A couple of years ago, during a talk on responsible consumption with secondary-school students, I felt something was not working. It was not a lack of manners or even of interest. The message seemed addressed to the group and, precisely for that reason, it could feel addressed to no one.
I changed the approach on the spot. I asked them to write their names on a piece of paper and leave them visible on the desk. Then I began calling them by name.
“What do you want to be when you grow up?”
Familiar answers appeared: a doctor, an architect, an engineer, a teacher.
When they had finished, I offered them another possibility.
“There is something you can start being right now, without waiting to finish your studies or to have a profession: inhabitants.”
The word needed explaining. For me, being an inhabitant means more than occupying a place. It is recognising that we live within relationships: with our body, with other people, with a community and with the physical world that sustains us. And that the way we are present leaves effects.
I then asked what a good inhabitant would do. The answers were simple: treat others well, care for nature, not make a mess, help, show respect. Nothing especially sophisticated. That was precisely the point.
We often speak to young people — and to adults — about what they will become: profession, success, career, status. Much less about the way they can inhabit, today, the place they already occupy.
Being an inhabitant does not require heroism. It starts in quite ordinary things: how we look after the body, how we speak to someone, what we consume, what we do with a shared space, whether we let a label stand in for a person, whether we cooperate when we could look away.
We will not always see the effect of those decisions, and not all of them will carry the same weight. But no life happens outside them.
Perhaps Habitum Vitae begins exactly there: not only asking what we want to become, but how we want to inhabit in the meantime.