In the summer of 2008, I had three weeks of holidays scheduled with Pablito and Nico. It was the first time ever that we were going to spend such a long time together, just the three of us, and I looked for an environment that would allow us to really connect with each other. The separation from Josée had left many wounds open and I thought that trekking together would give us time to bond without disruptions.

I walked into a travel agency in Geneva which was specialised in trekking trips and explained my situation. Immediately, the man said: ‘Go to Ladakh. It’s in the Himalayas, you won’t even be able to use your mobile phone there.’ 

The trip to Ladakh did indeed bring the three of us together. We would walk for six hours per day and sleep in tents at night. The food was delicious and the mountains spellbinding. Before leaving, you had put into my luggage Tuesdays with Morrie and every night, over dinner, one of us would read a chapter and then we would all talk about it. Over time, my conversations with Pablito and Nico became longer and we grew on each other. It was exactly what I had been hoping for.

But Ladakh turned out to be a lot more than a family healing expedition. Unknown to me, it’s a Buddhist area of India. As luck would have it, Mutup, our guide, was well versed in the Buddhist teachings and every day, as we wandered from village to village, he would tell us about different aspects of the Buddha’s discoveries about human nature. When we visited temples, the paintings on the walls illustrated the different themes that Mutup talked about.

When we arrived in Leh, the capital of Ladakh, I went to its only bookstore and bought Buddhism for Dummies, which I finished reading even before we left India. When I returned home, I couldn’t stop talking about the concepts I had learned: impermanence, dependent origination, the four noble truths, the eightfold path, etc.

Your spiritual anchors, my darling, have always been quite deep, but I found in the Buddha’s insights the answers to most of the questions that occupied me. From 2008 onwards, almost every day I have read something related to Buddhism or Buddhist thinking, and it has in many ways transformed my life. My growing interest and enthusiasm for Buddhism led a few years later to meditation, a practice that has also had a major impact on my life.

You and I have had the extraordinary privilege to meet the Dalai Lama three times. On one occasion, I was able to exchange a few words with him and he held my hand. I will never forget his penetrating eyes, the kindness in his look and the softness of his skin. This is a man who has taught me enormously, not just through his words, but especially through his actions.

On a few occasions, we also met Matthieu Ricard, the Dalai Lama’s French interpreter and close associate. A Frenchman, he left a promising career in biology behind him to live in India and become a monk. He has written extensively on meditation and on Tibetan Buddhism. One of the books that marked me the most is The Monk and the Philosopher, which features a series of dialogues between Matthieu and his father, a well-known philosopher. The book, would inspire Pablito and me to record our own set of dialogues in the summer of 2019.

From 2006 onwards, I began to do everything possible to fit my business schedule into our lives—not the other way around. We nearly always travelled together and I made sure that my compensation package with Saatchi and later with Publicis, included a clause that allowed you to accompany me wherever I went. Sometimes, if I needed to go somewhere, but the timing was flexible, we would look at the cultural activities available in the town I had to go to, and I would book my travel to coincide with a concert, an opera or an event that we both wanted to see. 

There were years when, together, we visited over 30 locations around the world and spent more than half the year travelling. We saw so many interesting things and had so many experiences, that sometimes we would both long for a bit more quiet and sufficient time to absorb it all, which we found in our chalet in Chamonix.