A Message to LC Bucharest

From: Benedikt Glatzl
Sent: Wednesday, January 31, 2007 4:32 AM
To: Mugur Florea
Subject: A message to you, your EB and your LC =)



Hey Mugur,

whew, finally I find some time to write this mail that I wanted to write
already a long time ago.

Life was pretty stressful over the last few months (of course due to AIESEC, what do you think? ;-) and brought me a lot of challenges, a lot of good laughs and also my share of losing. Although I'm still astonished by the speed I went through all this I wouldn't want to have missed a single thing.

While searching for your e-mail address in my Mail-Inbox I just discovered that your first mail to me was from almost a year ago, from February 2006, when you asked me about how I set up our LC blog. I bet you don't remember that was me, right? I was just being selected as a teamleader back then.

As I wrote to you in your blog, I think I went to quite a similar thinking process as you did regarding taking one step further in my AIESEC career. I know the whole culture and your life-situation is quite different from mine, but in the end we obviously both had some points of time in our life, where we took major decisions and altered the course of our life in our own ways,
be it the obvious or the not so obvious ones. I salute you for your decision to take a year of consolidation and somehow I secretly ask myself if such kind of a decision would have been the even tougher choice for me than the one I finally took.

I chose to follow the way I took shortly after I joined AIESEC. One year of mind-blowing experiences, tearing down realities and mindsets, challenging my worldview by challenging my view on myself to a point where I could not any longer deny what I did wrong and what I should do differently in the future. With pride I stood up for my values, but with pride I also denied myself from speaking out early enough what would have helped a lot of things go better. Looking back now I can clearly see that I was wrong several time, that I made stupid mistakes and that I was several times not able to say "I was wrong" or "I won't be able to do it".

Even though I saw and heard what was wrong, I couldn't see it with my heart.

Even though I read everything about life in my books, I couldn't really connect to that life.

It was this year of intensely living AIESEC that made me realize that nothing I knew really mattered.

What finally made me growing was all that I went through, all that I experienced, all that I truly lived.

This is AIESEC.

This is the meaning of the AIESEC experience. This is the true experience that can never be expressed in any diagram or chart and never measured by any balanced scorecard.

This is, what made me decide to carry on and take on seemingly unbearable challenges, because I knew that I would find enlightment about myself and the world only by dancing with the fiercest fires and carrying on these fires to those who seek life as I do.

Last Saturday I was elected Member Committee President of AIESEC in Austria for the term 2007-2008. I will try to carry out this honorable office with all the precious memories of the past year in my heart.

I wanted to thank you, your EB and your whole LC for some of the most remarkable moments of this past year, be it the empowering conference Re-imagine between LC Bucharest and LC Vienna that filled our LC relationship with a very personal meaning for me, be it the hiking tour with the EB Bucharest to the peak of Moldoveanu that steeled my will to never give up, be it the experience of chairing your LTS which gave me the last security I needed for dedicating myself fully to run for MCP. I could recall several special moments, which would never have been possible without you being who you are and being how you are.

Rock on, LC Bucharest!

There will be fun times. There will be hard times.

There will be times you will dance through the rain and sing praise to all the wonderful experiences you gained and all the wonderful people you met through AIESEC.

There will be times you will condemn the whole AIESEC and all its members and where you would like to tell all of them how wrong and narrow-minded they are.

There will be times you won't be able to hold back your tears, and words won't help you anymore to express the feelings you will have - overwhelmed by the bitter taste of losing or the sweet taste of winning.

But in the end - you will know that it all happened for a reason.

Rock on, LC Bucharest!

Thank you for sharing some of these moments with me and thank you for all the moments that are still there to be shared.


See you in this world or another,

Bene