In his study about the landscape, the Austrian poet Reiner Maria Rilke made this remark: “We know how ill we see the things amongst which we live and that it is often necessary for someone to come from a distance to tell us what surrounds us.” When we are in our usual environment, we accomplish our tasks in the usual way, we tend to pay less attention to objects and people, and we lose our ability to perceive the richness and diversity of our environment. Habits and the fast pace of life often dull our senses; we are no longer able to consciously perceive everything that is around us and that we take for granted.

The lecture seeks an answer to the question, how can we change our usual way of life and see the living and non-living world of our environment in a different way?

Dr. Gábor Csepregi is a philosopher and visiting scholar at St. Paul’s College, University of Manitoba and visiting fellow at Mathias Corvinus Collegium. He was a water polo player, he left Hungary at the age of 18 in 1968, when he swam across the present-day Slovenian-Italian border and traveled to Canada. He participated in three Olympics with the Canadian water polo team as team captain and later as national coach. Meanwhile he studied theology and became a doctor of philosophy in 1986. Between 1985 and 2010 he was a professor, vice president and regent of studies at the Dominican University College in Ottawa. From 2010 he was vice president, and between 2014 and 2019 president at Université de Saint-Boniface in Winnipeg.