Dear Léman 2 Graduates,

Congratulation and well done for getting your first degree! A bitter sweet moment in the lives of a new generation ready to start their new adventures with full steam ahead!

We are proud of you, and wish you only the best in your future adventures!

Keep in touch 🙂

A lovely smile and sweet treats… plenty of them 🙂 What else one needs to spend a pleasant birthday ??? 🙂

We wish you the best Aryan.

The key to happiness is simplicity.

At least that’s what the boys seem to think.

We have talked about the balance between immediate and long term satisfaction. Whilst immediate satisfaction focuses on the moment and is definitely important to make our present lives meaningful, long term satisfaction grasps a deeper meaning and engages us in a long term project of building the foundations of our future happiness.

It takes commitment and sometimes the sacrifice of our immediate wishes and instincts. So while a part of us focuses on a “carpe diem” mentality, the other should work on the things that will drive us to a happy stable future.

Another topic was: the sense of happiness can’t exist without the knowledge of what sadness is. Happiness and sadness are two sides of a coin as one can’t be without the other. Anyone who hasn’t experience sadness will never appreciate joy when he feels it. One can debate if a human being can live and be happy without feeling sad… however, most likely this has never happened.

And as you can see in the video below, for all the boys, happiness is not a difficult thing.

Another great game was played today between New Portena and Léman. Although Léman won, the Ladies from NP put up a great fight as the match was won only in the 3rd set, making it very close.
Well played to both teams!! 🙂

Anuar, had a quiet day. He woke up early, went running to Geneva and back and returned for 9.30 for some breakfast. After lunch he went to town after having ran over 20kms and counted over 36000 steps.

He is taking it easy and saving energies for his exams 🙂

Ethics and courtesy are at the heart of Léman Boarding House so even before a Chess game, greetings and Fair Play are the key 🙂

The match started with a traditional opening from the whites who quickly made an impression against the opponent who, in his turn tried to defend its positions as effectively as possible. Little by little the match became more balanced with the blacks using a more aggressive pressing at the centre of the chessboard whilst using the flanks to pierce through the enemy’s lines with a well-thought combination of swift but surprising moves.

The whites, quickly resented the physical efforts of the intimidating opening and were caught distracted and unprotected in the person of their King who ended up surrendering to the black army to great despair of his Queen, helpless to come to rescue her beloved one.

In the end, the blacks celebrated victory but not for long as a revenge battle was promised for the days to come.

Let’s be honest. We all do it. Everyone does it. We will keep on doing it.

Mistakes are an important part of our lives. We can’t picture a meaningful life without mistakes. Mistakes are the choices we make that enable us to learn, assess and move forward. Without them our learning curve wouldn’t exist, our existence as intelligent beings wouldn’t make sense… we would do everything purely by instinct without this wonderful capacity of looking at what went wrong and what could we have done differently.

Particularly for young people, mistakes are seen as a dreadful and haunting thing. Well… it all depends. While making mistakes is a part of growing up, repeatedly making the same mistakes and using this excuse to keep them going and going, and showing no progress or positive learning, then indeed it becomes counter productive and it’s careless behavior.

That is why rules and laws are so important. They set the boundaries of our freedom and lay the foundations of a balance for a whole group or society. For as unpleasant and hard to follow as they may be, they are the pillars of any organized structure and they exist even in animal societies. By not respecting them we interfere with the whole community and its sense of fairness, we cause harm and deceive those around us.

What is essential is to understand the reasoning behind these rules. Blindly obeying to rules and laws, in a practical sense is ok, but one who does so, does not understand why complying is important. His responsibility towards them is passive. On the other hand with an active responsibility we understand and embody the principles of that guideline and do that out of respect to others and ourselves too

“To err is human, to forgive is divine” said the great poet Alexander Pope. This is what we try to do here. We give our students room to learn, we encourage and try to accompany them in this process. And we try to forgive, because making (legitimate and innocent) mistakes and forgiving are part of the values we consider to be the core of our pastoral role.

Yet again… the Léman Dream Team won their first game of the volleyball tournament against mighty Olympus.

It was quite close at the beginning, but Léman was just unstoppable… 🙂

Both teams filled with respect for one another – RISE.