As a teenager Gus Fares would spend hours drawing the many buildings he loved before they were destroyed by bombings. Architecture was his calling, but his home city was being decimated, and his love of beautiful buildings must have been challenged. When his first office was destroyed by a bomb it was time to make a new start.
‘What’s the worst that could happen?’…a question we often ask ourselves when we’re facing a difficult decision or tough situation.
You’re nervous about an important business call you’re about to make; ‘what’s the worst that could happen?’ Probably someone hanging up on you, so you tell yourself you could survive that.
When you started dating; ‘what’s the worst that could happen?’ They would say no, so you tell yourself you could survive that.
Even when you first learnt to ski; ‘what’s the worst that could happen?’ You could break a leg and even then you tell yourself you could survive that.
But what if the answer to ‘what’s the worst that could happen?’ about an everyday event is that you might die?
That adds a whole new dimension to the question, doesn’t it? Most of us would probably not do it, whatever ‘it’ was, after all, what ordinary activities are really worth dying for?
For Gus Fares, growing up in war-torn Lebanon in the seventies and eighties, there was no choice. Even something as simple as walking to school meant you could possibly be killed by a stray bullet, or bomb.
Gus recalls, “I was twelve when the war started, so in a way it was a good thing, because being so young you became quite resilient fairly quickly.