I have always wanted to study the natural world, its structures, its mysteries, its silent laws. Some of my most vivid memories trace back to the summers of my childhood, in my grandparents' house in the southwest of France. I remember lying on the ground, the air thick with heat and cicadas, lost between pages of Le Bus Magique.
When I wasn't being swallowed by the ocean waves, I was diving through those books, discovering the invisible forces that shape our world. Learning about nature, the elements, the human soul.
One day, I stumbled upon the Richter scale, and in the following book, the Fujita scale. I was so fascinated that I had to recreate them. I instantly took a sheet of paper and a pen, drew a table, an axis, and reproduced these scales. Without realizing it, I had just drawn the very first scientific graph of my life.
Back then, I didn't understand what compelled me so strongly. I still can't fully explain it now, and I probably never will. But looking back, I recognize what captivated me: the idea of measuring the unmeasurable. Of giving form and number to what is wild, raw, and untamed. Life flows, waves crash, tornadoes twist, earthquakes move the earth itself — yet to quantify them is, in a sense, to stop time. To glimpse eternity in motion.
I have spent much of my life searching for myself, trying to define who I am. I have always been uneasy when faced with the question — and you, who are you? What do you do in life? Unable to fit into any box, unable to quantify myself, yet paradoxically drawn to numbers, categories, and classifications of all kinds. We often seek what we lack.
Numbers represented, to me, a world of certainty within an uncertain environment, for an uncertain being.
It took years to understand that the certainty I was looking for was never in the numbers. It was in the act of looking itself. The child lying on the ground in southern France, reproducing scales he barely understood, was not really measuring earthquakes or tornadoes. He was doing something older than science. He was trying to make sense of a world that felt overwhelming in its beauty and its scale. He was trying to find his place inside it.
I have stood on the deck of an icebreaker at 84°N, watching sea ice disappear into a horizon that never darkened. I have run through mountain nights and sat with data until the room grew cold. I have tried to be, simultaneously, a scientist and an athlete, a writer and a mountaineer, a rigorous mind and a feeling one. None of these felt like contradictions. They all felt like the same gesture. The same child, the same sheet of paper, the same stubborn need to hold something vast still long enough to understand it.
The unmeasurable, I have come to believe, is not what resists understanding. It is what makes understanding worth pursuing.
That child on the ground, I think he knew that already. He just needed a few more years, a few more graphs, and a frozen ocean or two, to be sure.