What I understood
the day I finally stopped
For ten years I chased a life I had never really chosen. Here is how a stone resting in the palm of my hand brought me back here — and how Moment Ici was born from that return.
The good student
For a very long time, I was the one who never disappointed anyone. Good report cards, good schools, good internships. I don't think I ever really decided to go into finance: I simply followed the straightest line I had been shown, and that line led there.
At twenty-five I had an office with a view, a salary my parents spoke of with pride, and a calendar so full there wasn't a single empty slot left to wonder whether any of it meant anything. I was high-performing. That was the word people used to describe me, and I heard it as a compliment.
For eight years, I lived in advance. Always in the next quarter, the next presentation, the next promotion. The present was just a corridor you cross quickly to get somewhere else.
“I was very good at living tomorrow.
I no longer knew how to live today.”
The emptiness, then the fall
Emptiness doesn't arrive all at once. It settles in slowly, like a room whose shutters you stop opening. First I stopped being hungry. Then I stopped sleeping. Then I started crying in the office bathroom between two meetings, telling myself it was just tiredness, that it would pass, that everyone lived like this.
One Tuesday in November, I sat down in my car in the car park and couldn't get out. Nothing dramatic — my body simply refused. It had understood before I had.
The doctors put a word on it: exhaustion. It took me months to find another one: I wasn't tired of working. I was tired of being absent from my own life.
“You don't recover from burnout by resting.
You recover by coming back.”
The first stone
A friend gave me an amethyst. I thanked her politely, thinking very hard that I didn't believe in that sort of thing. I put it on my bedside table and forgot about it for three weeks.
One sleepless night, I picked it up. It was cold, dense, slightly rough. And for the first time in a very long while, I thought about nothing but that sensation. Three seconds, maybe. Three whole seconds of the present.
I will never claim that a stone healed me. That would be untrue, and I don't want to tell stories. What I can say is that it gave me something to hold. A physical anchor in a day that was scattering in every direction. It is exactly what meditation does — which I learned afterwards — except that the stone fitted in my pocket and didn't ask me for twenty minutes of silence.
I started reading. Crystal healing, and the traditions that, on every continent, have paired minerals with intentions. I wasn't looking for magic there. I found something simpler and sturdier: a language for naming what you need.
What I believe, in very concrete terms
A stone replaces neither a doctor, nor therapy, nor a difficult decision. What it does is more modest and, I think, more valuable:
- it gives shape to an intention you can't yet put into words;
- it reminds you, by touch, ten times a day, of what you had decided to be;
- it turns an abstract resolution into a gesture the body knows.
The hands
The real turning point, though, didn't happen in front of a stone. It happened in a workshop.
I had gone away for a few days with no particular plan, and I pushed open the door of a jeweller's studio because the light inside was beautiful. He was working in silver. I stayed standing there for two hours watching him file, hammer and polish the same surface over and over, with a patience that struck me first as absurd, then as overwhelming.
He wasn't thinking about the next piece. He was entirely inside this one. All day long, he was doing what I had been unable to do for eight years: one thing at a time, completely.
I came home knowing that I wanted to learn that. Not just how to make jewellery — how to hold that quality of attention, and how to pass it on to other women who were running the way I had been running.
“A handmade piece carries the time
of the woman who made it.
That is why it settles you.”
Sofia
Sofia was born two years ago. I am thirty-five today, and I think she is the one who made all of this urgent.
Because a child lives only in the present. She knows nothing of next quarter or career plans. She looks at you and waits for you to be there, really there, now. There is no faking it.
My husband, who watched me fall and then get back up without ever rushing me, was the first to tell me to do it. Not “one day”. Now. He was right: there is never a good moment to begin something, there is only this one.
Moment Ici
The name came before the brand. Moment Ici — moment, here: the only two coordinates that truly exist.
And then came the line that says everything: the art of the present. I love it because it has two faces. The present is the instant — the one we spend our lives missing. And a present is a gift — what we offer to someone we love, or, sometimes, what we finally dare to offer ourselves.
Our jewellery sits exactly there. These are not decorative objects. They are wearable reminders. Each stone is chosen for an intention: grounding, calm, confidence, protection. You wear it, you forget it, and then a finger finds it at your wrist in the middle of a day moving too fast — and you come back.
I didn't want a brand that simply buys jewellery elsewhere and resells it. It would have made no sense: what I had seen in that studio was precisely the value of the hand that makes. So we brought together our own team of artisans, trained in heritage techniques — silversmithing, engraving, hand painting. Every piece is born here, from the first sketch to the last detail.
The three promises that will not change
- Handmade, in house. Our own team of artisans, our studios, our hands. No middleman between the maker and you.
- Stones whose origin I know. Sourcing that follows an ethical mining code. I would rather give up a stone than be unable to answer the question “where does it come from?”.
- Nothing is wasted. The precious metals and natural stones from our unsold pieces are recovered and remelted. And our jewellery is designed to last years, not a season.
The women behind Moment Ici
There is one thing I am perhaps prouder of than the jewellery itself: the team.
We are a small team, entirely made up of women. Young mothers who, like me, refuse to choose between their child and their ambition. Recent graduates who want a first job that means something. Women who have also walked away from a life that no longer looked like them.
I know what it is to work somewhere that empties you out. I decided, on day one, that this place would not do that to anyone.
“I didn't want to build a high-performing company.
I wanted to build a place where you can be present.”
If you're reading this
There is a good chance you are running too. That somewhere you have a list that never ends and a small voice repeating that things will be calmer next month.
I am not going to tell you to walk away from everything. I didn't walk away from everything at once, and nobody should have to collapse before they are allowed to slow down.
But I can tell you this: start with three seconds. A stone in the palm of your hand, one breath, one thing at a time. It is ridiculously small, and it is exactly where everything began for me.
Every piece we make is an invitation to those three seconds. To give yourself, or someone you love, a little of the present.
Thank you for being here. Really here.
Give yourself a present
Every creation is handmade by our team of artisans, around a natural stone chosen for its intention. To wear, or to give.