Mani Freddi, Cuore Caldo

Two weeks ago, we had the first truly cold day since I've lived in Washington DC.  I put on my heaviest jacket, bundled up and took a deep breath before taking those first tentative steps outside.  My hands were cold, but my heart was warmed when a stranger on the street smiled at me and said encouragingly, "stay warm out there."  His glowing smile was contagious and I was determined to carry it with me, even when a gust of wind that surely came straight from the Arctic itself assaulted me as I turned the corner.  As two involuntary tears streamed down my cheeks, I held tightly onto my hood and that warm smile.

I don't know much about winter, but I'm familiar with bitter winds. We can measure the windchill in the air, but it takes more than thermometers to understand the windchill in our hearts.  It's a cold world out there, after all.  Shootings and bombings and hostages.  It's amazing how things happening far away can hit so close to home.  We watch wars play out on television and senseless acts of violence happen daily in our own cities, on our own streets, right in front of us.  The great Italian author Cesare Pavese once wrote "ogni guerra e' una guerra civile"- "every war is a civil war."

And that doesn't even begin to account for the individual tragedies that we could each write.  The stories of heartbreak and grief and betrayal, the loved ones we have lost, the addictions that have haunted us, the times when trust was broken--we carry these things like ice in bare, frozen hands, trying to make sense of a world that can be unflinchingly callous.

And what can we do about our vulnerable hearts, so often left out in the cold?  We can always take the easy way out and close ourselves off like we close our borders.  We can lock ourselves away from the cold, barricaded in a dark room alone.  We can meticulously turn the keys in each lock and stack furniture in the entrance way, as if grief and joy entered through different doors.  But despite our best attempts at insulation, the cold will always find a way in.

The world is big and it is scary.  We have to recognize that our hearts will surely take a beating, released on their own in a place where loss and suffering and grief are waiting around every corner to have their go.  But bloodied and bruised as we may be, shattered and torn and broken as we are, we have to get up off of the ground.  Even when all the odds are against us, we have to go back into the ring, gritting our teeth, determined to love again.

I certainly don't have all the answers but I've found that human warmth is about more than body temperature.  Someone wise once said that one of the great miracles of friendship is its unique ability to multiply the joys while dividing the sorrows.  I think of fresh-baked cookies and hugs that stay with you like a hearty meal.  I'm not talking about the delicate, cautious, polite hugs but rather the stick-to-your-ribs kind of hugs, the not-letting-go kind of hugs.  And I think of the humbly defiant chrysanthemums, which have recently become my favorite flower.  They refuse to give up their seemingly dainty petals, though all the other flowers might.  They will hold out in spite of the cold.

We too may find that we are more resilient than we initially thought, that we can, in fact, weather the cold.

So put on a scarf if you have to, but don't hide from the cold.  Fearlessly fill your lungs with the cold air and remember that this too is a part of life on an ever-changing planet.  The winter may be brutal, but we must recognize that even winter can't last forever.  Winter, after all, is followed by Spring.

Until then,

Stay warm out there.

The Lunching Hour

My favorite hour of the day is, of course, my lunch hour.  But although I'm beginning to adjust to this big city life and beginning to feel like I blend in more than I stand out, there are some things that I just can't quite get used to.  One of them is going out to lunch.

In Florence, ordering a sandwich is not so much about the sandwich at all, but about chatting with the man (or woman) behind the counter and the choice of fresh ingredients.  No one wears name tags, yet somehow we all know each other's names.  Take a moment to comment or compliment or celebrate or (if you are feeling very Italian) to complain, say whatever is on your mind.  The bread will sustain you, of course, but so will the conversation.  For this reason, it takes 5 minutes to make 1 sandwich.  This is the miracle of time in Florence.

And somehow, a lunch hour is the same amount of time in Washington DC, yet it feels so minimalistic, so bare bones, so cold.  I say my order as quickly as possible, using only the essential words and shuffle in a line with a dozen other people around the counter, performing an awkward daily dance that always ends with the impersonal swipe of a credit card.  My food crosses three or four different people's hands and I don't even have time to look any of them in the eye.  There will be no fretting over finding two euros for change, there will be the minimum required exchange of pleasantries.  When someone asks you how you are doing, you will tell them that you are doing well, thank you for asking, regardless of how you are actually doing. For this reason, they can serve 5 customers in 1 minute.  This is the miracle of time in Washington DC.

Daylight Savings Time

 "We must not allow the clock and the calendar to blind us to the fact that each moment of life is a miracle and a mystery."

-H.G. Wells

Lately, I've been thinking a lot about time and how it passes and how we perceive it.  Today is a magical day when we create an hour out of thin air, simply by collectively deciding that it should be so.  And I'm tickled by the thought as I wind my watch back.

Still being a Washington outsider, I am completely fascinated by the complex and paradoxical relationship that people in this city have with time.  People are obsessed with saving time, yet seem to have so little of it.  On the streets, I see a hundred restaurant and coffee shop signs promoting an order-ahead-save-time scheme.  With the best of intentions, dozens of people have told me to download an app so that I can plan my commute down to the minute.  People tap their toes and click their heels, and run down the stairs even when the train has already left.  Plans with friends need to be made a week in advance.  In a place like this, people work hard and efficiency, or perceived efficiency, reigns supreme.

But it strikes me that all the scheming and planning and super organization is like looking for lost change in the couch in order to pay the mortgage.  It's drops in the ocean.  All these minutes and seconds that we have counted and calculated so painstakingly, where do they go at the end of the day?  Do we use them to call our mothers?  Or listen to our friends talk about their broken hearts?  Or beautify the world around us?

Our thinking about time is broken even down to the very essence of our language.  I wish we could change our idioms as easily as we change our clocks.  We talk about having time and running out of time and losing time without any sense of agency, as if everything is somehow beyond our control.  But the longer I live, the more I'm convinced that we actively make time for the things that matter to us and anything else is an empty excuse.  How we spend our time should be a conscious decision that we make, not something that totally mystifies us.

And yet...

In the most important moments of our lives, we have no choice but to be completely mystified by time.  We are powerless except to surrender to its incomprehensibility.

I occasionally find myself falling back in time to dinners and lunches around generous tables with seemingly endless bottles of Chianti and so many borrowed chairs squeezed in that they barely fit.  Yet there is always enough room for one more.  And there are peals laughter and big stories and small stories and gestures and drama and bread with young oil. This is a place where hours pass like seconds.

And I think about the times when seconds pass like hours.  I think of the baited breaths reaching out desperately for the acceptance of another human being in moments of vulnerability, moments when words come in groups of three.

I
love
you.

 Or

Please
forgive
me.

These fleeting instants when we step beyond time or exist outside of it, these are the seconds and hours that make us who we are.  In the moments that really matter, there is no difference between a minute and a millenium.

Units of Measure

Let's admit it.  We are a society of compulsive measure-ers.  We measure and we count and we fastidiously record the numbers, praying to find the hidden answers to our pains and miseries, the secrets of the universe, in mystical algorithms.

From pencil marks on papered walls, we measure our children in feet and inches, while we sweat over the slowly rising numbers on the scale, counting our own self-worth in pounds and ounces.    We confuse numbered hearts on Instagram with actual love and nervously note the number of wedding photos crossing our Facebook pages, while mourning each ticking second on our biological clocks.  Not surprisingly, students learn early-on to measure themselves by standardized test scores.  Which might work better if only the students themselves could be as standardized!  We count the zeroes in our bank accounts and tally our salaries and the amount of furniture we can cram into our houses.  All the credits and debits and interest rates that ultimately amount to that corrupt king of all measurements: the Gross Domestic Product!  A calculation that is omnipotent and holy, worshiped by all the talking heads on the television with its thousands of channels.

Maybe we should try measuring in poetry instead of in prose, in some of those things that are less easily quantifiable, yet all the more valuable.  Could we measure the miles traveled beyond the comfort of home as meticulously as the square feet within?  What if we came to appreciate the time and money given freely to others as much as the miserly sum hoarded in the bank?  It is a delightful paradox of our humanity that the more we give without counting the cost, the more we stand to gain!

I propose a success not measured by the length of our resumes and awards given to us by people whose names we can scarcely remember, but rather by the number of chairs around our kitchen tables  and how often they are filled and how many hours of card games and big belly laughs are enjoyed there.  What joy, what power, what love might we find in ourselves if we stopped counting everything else long enough to count our blessings?

Maybe the problem isn't so much the measuring as the units of measure.

Thoughts for the Far Off Future, in a Constantly Changing World

Someday I'll tell my children about what it was like before we could rewind the TV.  They'll ask how we survived when we had to choose between using either the phone or the internet, both of which were only available within the confines of our homes.  I imagine their looks of mixed confusion and admiration when I explain that people could once navigate using maps that didn't talk back or automatically zoom in on your destination.  They won't ever know what it's like to not be able to fit the entire world in their pockets--to hold the entire universe in the palms of their hands. 

I can't wait to tell them about travelling too, about all the lives you can't live through a screen.  Hiking up hills and mountains, fractured rainbows falling through stained glass windows in the breathtaking beautiful churches, the richness and complexity of Chianti Classico, sitting around a table where everyone laughs in the same language; these are the experiences I wouldn't trade for anything in the world.  Of course the next generation of travelers will scoff that it took 8 hours and $800+ to reach Europe from the East Coast.  Within their lifetimes, they'll be able to make that trans-Atlantic trip in the time it takes us to make a connection.  They'll jaunt off to Australia for the weekend.  I do envy them that.

I hope we'll travel together to Syria and the Middle East and visit restored museums and eat in restaurants and make new friends there.  I hope we'll be awe-struck by treasures as old as (older than?) civilization.  I pray that there will come a time when war and terror will be discussed only in the past tense.

I worry for the Earth and whether we will find a sustainable way to power our lives on our finite, beautiful little planet.  I hope that they will have hindsight advantage, left wondering at why we didn't find the solutions sooner, it was so obvious, after all.  Although I've always wanted a beach house, I hope that my hometown does not become ocean-front property anytime soon.

Like me, I hope they'll count Henry David Thoreau among their dearest friends.  When they are standing in front of a painting or piece of sculpture, I hope they listen for history's whispers, seeping into the air through the centuries. I hope they feel the thrill of looking Michelangelo or Bach or Cicero straight in the eyes, across millennia, engaging in that eternal human conversation that defies all the rules of space and time.

They'll read Harry Potter as one of the classics.  And when giving unsolicited advice, as parents always do, I'll tell them, echoing the words of a wise man, that the moment will arrive to decide between doing what is right and doing what is easy.  I'll tell them that they're sure to stumble along the way, but that I hope their balance always comes out on the side of the right.  

I'll tell them that excuses are cheap, but hard work is precious.  That honesty, sincerity, compassion and generosity are primary values absolutely vital to the living of a good life right now, in the present, not an afterthought that we can consider later.  By waiting for later to have more time or money or happiness to share some with others, we find paradoxically that we can never have enough.  Better to be content with what we have.  Better to decide now that what we have is enough. Better to believe that we don't have to to wait for the far off future.  Better to start today.

In this, above all, I hope that my actions will always speak infinitely louder than my words.

A Great and Resounding Perhaps

Leaving Italy sort of snuck up on me.  As usual, I don't feel remotely prepared for what's coming next but I'll be diving in anyways-- headfirst.  I didn't even tell very many people that I was leaving, perhaps not really believing it myself, which leaves me the awkward task of saying goodbye to everyone in the span of a few short days.

So why am I leaving anyway?  I guess for the same reason that I came: one day I asked my self what I wanted out of life and decided that I don't quite know what I'm looking for but I'm not going to find it here.

As always, I find that the trip is taking me rather than the other way around.  Taking me forward, I hope but at the very least, elsewhere.  And I hope that you'll still follow along with my adventures even when they don't involve passports or eight hour layovers or sleeping in airports (decidedly the least glamorous thing about long distance travel.). I intend to keep adventuring and writing and finding meaning in the small things as well as the big things (and the small things that are the big things.)

And people ask their questions like whether or not I'm "ready." To which I respond I was never "ready" but if I'm waiting to reach some magical moment of sudden preparedness, I'll be waiting an awfully long time.  If that question means to ask if there are moments when I ask myself whether or not I'm making a terrible mistake, I have to answer honestly and say that of course I have those moments, I've always had them and am not expecting that to change in the near future.

But when the doubts rear their excruciating and ambiguous head, I start throwing questions out to the universe.

Will it all work out in the end?

And the universe answers back, as it always does, with a great and resounding perhaps.

And on a good day, I read it as more of a probably.  And without further consideration, I start to pack my bags.  After all, it's the trips that take us, I'm just along for the ride.

The But of Both Worlds

Recently, I've been reflecting a lot on what my time here in Italy has meant.  I am fast approaching the three-year mark of my time abroad and possibly also my farewell (for now) to the life that I've built here.  I start to ask myself not only what it all means, but who I am, where I fit.  And the answers are perplexing and fraught with contradictions.  I've spent too long in Europe to use the unmodified word American to describe myself.  I've considered American?, American... and even American-Italian (the inverse of Italian-American), but nothing sticks.

When I'm meeting someone Italian, I usually answer the question of where I come from with a deliberately not-simple response: "SonoamericanamahovissutoinItaliadatreanni." ("I'mAmericanbutI'velivedinItalyforthreeyears.")  It's a sentence best pronounced breathlessly, without any spaces between the words.  Not until recently did I realize that I could choose to preference a different conjunction, saying with a greater sense of harmony, "I'm American and I've lived in Italy for three years."  But and feels somehow sythentic--the clear choice has always been but.  It's as if the second part of the sentence somehow negates the first part.  In a single word it contains I know the city center of Florence better than my own hometown and I really hate Starbucks* and most importantly, I'm desperately trying to understand the culture here in more than just a superficial way.  I would include those details too, if I could talk longer without taking a breath and if I didn't think that most people were asking just to be polite.

But the negation works both ways.  After all, I lead the explanation with my American-ness because without that detail, nothing else makes sense. I have a need to speak and read and write in English (a need that someone who has never left the English-speaking world inevitably takes for granted).  I have my education, based very much in American methods of thinking and learning.  I constantly crave peanut butter and French fries no matter how much I love the food here.  Finally, I completely lack the ability to understand the niceties of social context necessary to properly use the infamous formale.   These things are a part of my identity too. No matter how long I have been here, I am a foreigner, a straniera.  (Thanks to a lovely linguistic trick, the word straniera conveniently has the word strange, strana, built right in, which makes further explanation somewhat unnecessary.)

In the end, I come back to the smallest word, the one that is simultaneously the most and least loaded of all the words: the but.  That unresolved tension, the word on which the paradoxes hang is maybe the most important part of my identity at this moment in time.  It's the root of all the frustration and uncertainty, that feeling of never being one hundred percent at home anywhere.  That said, it's also where the beauty comes from, the thrill and an awful lot of the joy.  The magic of the but is that it is necessitated by two things, by two identities, by two different worlds.  It implies a life that is confusing and less-than-straightforward, but also extremely rich, textured and diverse.  It's everything and nothing, that word.  It leaves me feeling full and empty at the same time, loved and lonely, fragmented and complete--but never bored, never unchallenged.

And I could take or leave....but, on the other hand, is here to stay.

----

*At risk of being accused of being a fraud by certain people, I should clarify that my relationship with Starbucks falls more on the spectrum between love-hate and love-to-hate than I'm willing to admit.

Away With Words

Communication can be difficult.  I remember groping my way blindly through my third semester Italian class.  That's the semester we learned to formulate hypothetical statements which in the Italian language is a complex and nuanced art form which like painting or gold smithing, can take years or even decades to truly master.  

I remember one day another student, in the middle of a grammar exercise, cried out in frustration,

"I just can't tell the difference between reality and imagination!"

"That," responded our professor who was wise and Sicilian, "is the result of watching too many Disney movies as a child."

And it makes me laugh to think about it now, but there's an unexpected bit of truth in it.  Language is like a filter in our brains through which all of our thoughts have to pass.  It affects our perception of time, of essence, maybe even of where the line is between what is real and what is hypothetical.  It's one of a million reasons that two people having the same experience can perceive things differently.

As for me, although I would not consider myself fully bilingual, I do live bilingually, in constant flux.  But "bilingual" is a term I don't like. I have always been resentful of it because it implies that there are two different systems that can be kept separate, that there is a switch that you hit or a line that you cross and suddenly everything has changed.  Now in English.  Ora in italiano.  

If only the world were so clean and clear cut!!!!

Linguistically speaking, it's more of gooey, melty, sticky mess.  Picture a dog eating peanut butter.  When I think about writing, speaking or social interaction within this inescapably bilingual context, a life experience that comes to mind is the time I almost drowned in one of those playground ball pits when I was a child. I feel like I'm constantly flailing around, grabbing for something, for anything that is solid.  Searching for the right words, you take what you can get and hope to make it out alive.  It's chaotic and confusing and crazy, yet somehow in the end, I always find myself wanting more.

Of course, I expect that there will be some lingering traces of English in my Italian.  It's my native tongue after all.  What I did not anticipate is the way that Italian has crept in and taken up residence in the English-speaking part of my life. 

The idioms and Italianisms are inescapable!  Suddenly, I find myself asking my friends if they would like to take a coffee with me.  I picture myself running up to the counter with a ninja suit on, grabbing the espresso and making a run for it.  

We don't say that in English, I remind myself.

And come in language, cosi' in life.  I find myself feeling like I am constantly caught between two different cultures: too American to be proprio italiana and too changed by my experiences abroad to be simply American.  

At moments, it's a priveleged position.  I've always enjoyed having the opportunity to be the go-between, the translator, the mediator.  Building bridges suits me; it's a role in which I find fulfillment.  But at moments, it can also be confusing, frustrating and even lonely.  When my thoughts wander towards the existential, I start to consider questions like where do I belong?  At times, it feels like the answer is everywhere.  At other times, nowhere. The line between the two is astonishingly thin.

But sometimes I find a place where everything falls away into a quiet tranquility.  Sitting on the couch in a close friend's apartment with a glass of wine in hand.  Whatever challenges the universe may present to us, we are in it together.  At the corner table in my favorite restaurant where the waiters greet me with a warm smile and kiss on the cheek.  Somehow food tastes better when you can shake the hand that prepared it. A scenic place to sit in the springtime sunshine. 

These are life's less-discussed joys: friendships that are equally comfortable in silence, glances that say everything without words, the first bite of your favorite meal, the tingling warmth of sunshine on bare skin for the first time since winter.  These things are beautiful, maybe because they don't require words or maybe because they're beyond words.  

Maybe because it's those little things that occasionally leave you speechless.  

Finding My Way

Recently, I've been running up against this word, a word that I hate so much it makes my blood boil, just hearing it.  A concept that I feel like I'm constantly defying, pushing back against, trying to tear down.  But trying to break through this idea, it's like going up against a wall: I can hit and punch and fight, but ultimately, the wall is still there and not any worse for the wear.  The word is perfection.  And everytime I hear it, it makes me want to scream.

Because we have this idea that perfection is something that we can attain, that we need to attain.  The perfect body, the perfect partner, the perfect house, the perfect life.  But we find in this life that we can never be skinny enough or pretty enough or rich enough or successful enough.  There will always be someone on Facebook whose life looks more appealing than our own.  When we seek our happiness from perfection, we talk about it like an earthquake, something that will just violently and suddenly happen to us, without warning, when all the conditions are just right.  It is something that we have no control over, that is totally beyond our reach.

It leaves us afraid of the messy and the uncontrollable, the things that don't fit in the proverbial box that we have already decided must contain our whole life.  Some of the things that won't fit are failure and uncertainty, ruining everything and looking like an idiot.  I'm not sure about all of you, but I've encountered so much of these things in my life (and in myself) that I've had to expand my proverbial box to accommodate plenty of screw ups.

But where does this fear of failing come from?  It is the nervousness of standing in front of the blackboard trying to do a math problem in front of the whole class (show your work!).  It is the anxiety of giving a presentation at work, speaking before a group of people whose respect you value (In conclusion...).  It is the excruciating decision of which words you will choose when you are talking to the someone who means everything to you and you want to pronounce one of those painfully simple yet painfully difficult phrases: I love you or I'm sorry.  

I have seen it in students over the past three years as they try to tackle the Italian language, which is a struggle that I've personally been living along with them.  At the beginning, there is always the fear that you will make a mistake, or say something wrong or look like an idiot.  I want to tell them that if they keep working at it that they will stop making mistakes, stop saying things wrong and be perfect.  But the fact is that in language learning as in life, you never stop making mistakes, you just learn that most of the mistakes ultimately don't matter: sometimes they're even funny, sometimes they're even useful.  At a certain point, you accept imperfection as a fact of life and you get over it. 

Recently, I've felt the need to remind myself to think of my life in the same terms.

Maybe it's especially because the last month has been overwhelming for me.  Moving to a new city and starting a new job, coupled with all the usual general daily frustrations of being an expat, of being a foreigner has proven enough to drive me insane at moments.  There are days when I feel like I can't do anything right!  (Let me remind everyone once again to please be kind to the foreigners and stranieri in your life--we need all the help we can get!)  

And all this has me asking myself how my life would be different had I chosen a different path, a different course, one with fewer rocks and pitfalls and places to stumble.  I think all of us twenty-somethings have at one moment found ourselves scrolling through Facebook, comparing lives with our friends and thinking to ourselves in a moment of existential panic, has everything I've done up until this point been some kind of a terrible mistake?  Am I wasting my life?  

I think we're all looking for road signs here, for things to reassure us that we're headed in the right direction.  We want the clarity, solid lines, definitions and borders that we took for granted growing up.  But what nobody ever bothered to tell us in school or in college is precisely how messy life can be.  It's less a peaceful stroll in the park and more one of those military-grade obstacle courses.  With mud.  Lots of mud.  Did I mention that it's also raining?  We'll reach the end eventually, but not without a lot of sliding, a lot of falling and a lot of pulling ourselves back up, even when we'd rather just throw in the towel.  

Life isn't some kind of an equation that we solve, discovering at the end that x=42, as much as we would like it to be.  Usually, I have found that x=? or x=some-imaginary-number or something equally  frustratingly unfathomable.  Although we want to see in black and white, reality is fraught with grey areas and ambiguity and moral dilemmas and paradoxes that we will never "solve," never reconcile with our beliefs or the world that we so desperately want to live in and it is for that reason that we will continue asking ourselves is this all some kind of terrible mistake???  If you're not asking yourself that question, maybe you just haven't thought about it enough.

But to be honest, I was never satisfied with answers that didn't lead to more questions and I've always thought that those people who claim to "have it all figured out" are either lying or terribly deluded.  I'm learning to enjoy a good roll in the mud, or at least learning to have a good laugh about it afterward.  

Being human, I will probably continue scrolling through Facebook and making comparisons when I shouldn't.  I'll see friends who appear to be doing significantly better than me at taking a perfectly respectable path, doing better than me at having things like stable jobs and houses and spouses.  And I'll wonder where that leaves me and whether or not I'll eventually find the right way, the perfect way.

But then I'll remind myself that there is no manual on how to do this, no surefire 100% money-back guaranteed guide to perfection.  At the end of the day, we're all playing by ear, making it up as we go along.  My choices constitute as valid an attempt as any and so do yours and yours and yours.  

Will we ever find our way?

Maybe there is no right way.