This is the third of a four-part blog series. The first two parts are as follows: Part 1 - Identity: The Third Act and the Third Turn: When the Career Ends but the Story Doesn't. https://www.ricklecouteur.com/post/the-third-act-and-the-third-turn-when-the-career-ends-but-the-story-doesn-t-690 Part 2 - Flow: The Flow State: When You Forget to Look at the Clock. https://www.ricklecouteur.com/post/the-flow-state-when-you-forget-to-look-at-the-clock-691 Five-Point Summary We may

I don't know her name. I don't know where she lives. I don't know whether she has children or grandchildren, whether someone was waiting for her at home that evening, or how many mornings she has carried her fruit to this same place. I know only where I photographed her. She was a fruit vendor near the Mukki Gate of Kanha National Park in central India. And I took her photograph. She was holding her tray of fruit close to her chest. Mangoes and dates, bright splashes of yello

This essay follows a previous blog titled: This Little Girl No Longer Exists: Who Owns a Moment? Two weeks ago, I was traveling along the Canal du Midi aboard the Saraphina. Our guide was Rex, and on one particular day he was introducing us not simply to southern France, but to the history, architecture, streets, and people of Narbonne. I was doing what I always do when I travel. Watching. Learning. And taking photographs. Outside one of Narbonne’s great old buildings stood a

Two years ago, in a public park in Sydney, Australia, I took a photograph of a little girl eating lunch. I did not know her. I did not know her parents. I did not ask their permission. She did not pose for me. I simply saw a moment, raised my camera, and pressed the shutter. There were other people around her, but it was her expression that caught my attention. She was holding a piece of bread in one hand and looking sideways at another child who was eating. Her mouth was exp

There is something wonderfully democratic about the Canal du Midi. You do not need to own a yacht. You do not need years of boating experience. You do not even need, in the conventional sense, to know very much about boats. You can simply rent one. Companies such as Le Boat and other operators rent self-drive pleasure craft from bases along the Canal du Midi. After a relatively brief introduction to the boat - how to start it, steer it, stop it, operate the ropes and negotiat

Gordon (Goggs) McManus of Off The Boat singing on the deck of Saraphina, Canal du Midi There are surprises that are carefully advertised as surprises and consequently surprise nobody. And then there are the real ones. One evening aboard Saraphina, our barge on the Canal du Midi, Captain Finn casually announced that there would be a surprise before dinner. That was all he said. We were moored against the bank of the canal, somewhere in that wonderfully indeterminate world that

There may be no more famous street in the world. The Avenue des Champs-Élysées runs in a grand, almost theatrical line from the Place de la Concorde toward the Arc de Triomphe. It is monumental Paris: broad pavements, plane trees, cafés, luxury stores, traffic, tourists, monuments and history. The Arc dominates the western end of the avenue, reminding everyone who looks up that this is a place intended to impress. But when I walked the Champs-Élysées with a camera, I found my

Rue Saint-Ferdinand is not one of the great streets of Paris. It isn't the Champs-Élysées. It doesn't have the grandeur of Boulevard Saint-Germain or the fashionable mythology of Rue Saint-Honoré. It is only about 435 metres long, running through the Ternes quarter of the 17th arrondissement from near the Église Saint-Ferdinand-des-Ternes toward the Avenue de la Grande-Armée. And yet, after spending some time here, I began to think that this modest street tells you something

France is one of the great homes of street photography. And, in 2026, it is also one of the more complicated places in which to practice it. Walk through Paris, Aix-en-Provence, Narbonne, or Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer with a camera and the temptation is everywhere. A woman reading alone at a café. An elderly couple walking arm in arm. Children chasing pigeons across a square. A waiter smoking during his break. A man asleep on a bench. Two strangers arguing. Two others kissing.

The restaurant district of Sainte-Marie-de-la-Mer was alive. Tables spilled onto the pavement. Glasses of wine caught the evening light. Plates arrived and disappeared. Waiters threaded their way between tightly packed chairs. Conversations overlapped with laughter and the clatter of cutlery. It was one of those wonderfully French scenes in which the distinction between restaurant and street seems almost to disappear. And then I noticed the old man. He was standing beside a w

There are places you visit to see something, and there are places you visit simply to be there. Cours Beauvais, in Aix-en-Provence, belongs to the second category. Nothing particularly monumental needs to happen. There is no famous painting to stand in front of, no cathedral façade demanding explanation, no plaque insisting that someone important once lived here. The attraction is more immediate than that. The attraction is life itself. Walk through Aix in the late afternoon

There are museums where we go to see paintings. And then there are places where we go to meet the painter. Cézanne’s atelier in Aix-en-Provence is one of those places. It sits above the city on the hill of Les Lauves, a modest building surrounded by trees and an overgrown Provençal garden. Paul Cézanne bought the land in 1901 and had the studio built for himself. From 1902 until his death in 1906, this was where he came to work, particularly in the mornings. It became the set

There are addresses that tell you where you are, and addresses that seem to tell you where you have been. 17 Rue Saint-Joseph is one of the latter. It is not one of the grand addresses of Aix-en-Provence. There is no sweeping staircase, no fountain splashing in a courtyard, no imposing façade announcing centuries of wealth. It is a small house on a narrow street in the old city, the sort of place you might walk past without noticing if you were hurrying somewhere else. But Ai

The Musée de l’Orangerie, at the western end of the Tuileries Garden, began not as a museum but as a winter shelter for the garden’s orange trees - hence its name. Built in 1852, the long, light-filled building eventually found a very different purpose when Claude Monet offered a monumental group of his Nymphéas (Water Lilies) to the French nation following the First World War. Monet was closely involved in planning how the paintings would be displayed, envisioning great pano

There is a particular kind of walking one does in Paris that has very little to do with getting anywhere. You begin with a destination, or at least the pretense of one, and then Paris interferes. A café catches your eye. A dog trots past with the confidence of a regular. Someone emerges from a boulangerie carrying a baguette under one arm. A narrow street seems more interesting than the broad one you are following, so you turn down it. And before long you have forgotten where

There are moments when you go to a museum to look at the paintings. And there are moments when the people looking at the paintings become every bit as interesting as the paintings themselves. This was one of those moments. We were in the Musée d’Orsay, in the Impressionist galleries, along with what appeared to be half the population of Paris and a substantial proportion of the tourists visiting Europe. The galleries were packed. People moved slowly from room to room in a gre

At a restaurant on the edge of the Place Saint-Sulpice, I noticed a family having lunch. There were six of them. Mother and father. Grandmother. Three children. The oldest was a boy with tousled hair. The middle child was a girl. The youngest was another boy, distinguished - at least in my memory - by a particularly unfortunate haircut. They were having a wonderful time. They talked. They laughed. They smiled. The children participated in the conversation. The adults listened

Your Turn by Alison Aubrey is scheduled for publication on September 8, 2026. In this blog I have treated Aubrey's published description and third turn framework as inspiration rather than implying that this four-part blog series is a review of the complete published book. Part 1 - Identity: The Third Act and the Third Turn: When the Career Ends but the Story Doesn't. Part 2 - Flow: The Flow State: When You Forget to Look at the Clock. Part 3 - Curiosity: Curiosity: The Fuel

Some time ago, I wrote about what I called the Third Act. The idea seemed straightforward. If life were a play, perhaps it could be divided - very approximately - into three acts. Blog At A Glance Retirement is not necessarily an ending. Leaving a career may close an important chapter without ending the larger story of a productive and interesting life. Allison Aubrey calls this the Third Turn. In Your Turn, Aubrey explores the possibility that midlife and beyond can be

I recently did something that, a few years ago, would have made absolutely no sense. I took one of my own blog posts and submitted it to an AI-detection program. The result came back: 7% of this text appears to be AI-generated. The accompanying graphic was reassuringly precise. Seven percent of the text resembles AI text. Ninety-three percent showed no AI text patterns. My first reaction was amusement. My second was curiosity. What exactly does 7 percent mean? Did artificial