Online lezing voor JCI De Nederlandse Senaat
28 mei 2020, Online
Ten tijde van corona inspireerde Jeroen andere JCI Senators met zijn lezing. Daarover verscheen in het internationale JCI Senate magazine (nog steeds op papier) het volgende verslag van Eric Brouwer:
Dutch Senator out of the blue…
The Dutch Senate tries to stay connected to the Senators throughout the year. Normally a few excursions or presentations are on the agenda, but not this time in May. For two reasons: well-known Covid is one, the other is: we didn’t fit in the location! As the location would have been a small plane, 3-4 persons max.. Dutch Senator Jeroen Komen (#68710) took his attendees from their own living room or back yard (it was a wonderful evening) to higher levels during his presentation, titled ‘Flying to the horizon’. Jeroen has his own plane, fitting only a few, and combines hobby as a pilot with his other hobby: taking pictures.
During an interactive session, with many pictues (of both landscapes and fellow Senators on board), Jeroen showed how flying is part of his life. The plane brought him many new connections, in JCI and outside JCI (his way of travelling to conferences and ski areas in Austria with JCI, for example, also made him use homestays and meet great people around (greater) Europe. Learning from their way of living and their stories, and the other way around. Being on his own, high up in the air, allowed for reflection, and at the same time it taught him that the independency still needs connection, to air traffic control for example. You can’t do it on your own, but you have to take many decisions on your own: just like a company owner, but more ‘live & death’ related at these heights. In the early days, without wifi and mobile phones everywhere, his hobby also meant he had to leave the company (Knoworries, an IT solutions company) behind, let the daily control to the crew on the ground. And it worked! This way Jeroen was more and more able to leave his company behind, before -several years ago- selling it to his business partner. The whole process was shaped during his air traveling: contradiction between freedom, structures (in landscapes and companies) and the way of ‘looking at his company and life from above’ has changed his view and way of living. The contradiction between structures in the landscapes and his need to escape from strict structures, made Jeroen sell his company. He can now spend lots of time on his hobby, but even more so on his family as he has landed in the small town of Deurne, but with adventures looking around every corner. Jeroen even made a book and website (https://ikkanvliegen.nl/), with magnificent pictures of his trips and -even if you do not speak Dutch- it is worth checking the breath taking views that can be seen when you look at life from a distance…. He now is a public speaker at conferences as well, check his TEDX talk here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBNKF4kTTsI .