Part 1 - EAT
I have read… quite possible one of the best books ever. Or maybe, in hindsight, it wasn’t the best book ever but the best book for me right now. I have been trying very hard to get away from the computer and the countless hours I am spending on facebook (meaninglessly browsing profiles and pics and playing games). So I keep trying to get myself to focus on other things, more important things. This week has been really good so far with that because I read 3 books. The first one was a bit of a forced read by my mother, called ‘you can heal your life’. It was a bit preachy and not my style, but the message came across loud and clear. You have control over your thoughts and emotions and this creates a path in the universe. And if you are a positive person and think positive things the universe will come together and make it a reality. Well as of Sunday I immediately put this into effect every night. And of course Wednesday happened! I like the idea of being an optimist, and not to throw away my realist side but just allow myself to dream and be happy. And stay away from negative thoughts (and negative people, one in particular…ahem). I read another book which was called ‘little white lies’, it was my second or third time reading it and it’s a cute little chick flick. And then I read eat pray love… and wow, just wow. A book has not impacted me so powerfully since I read ‘the game.’ It was written so beautifully, each word meticulously chosen, each thought, coherent with my own, each chapter, parallel to my life, it literally left me breathless. I had to go back and read so many paragraphs and pages twice because I just couldn’t grasp the whole beauty of the words. I love metaphors and books that invoke strong powerful images. Usually that happens a few times in the entirety of a book... But in this book it was every page, every sentence. You could read just one thing and be lost for hours. No doubt I could have finished it overnight but I wanted to, needed to relish in it. So I allowed myself to divide it into its 3 parts, and take 3 separate journeys. Here is what impacted me from every section.
PART 1 EAT
The exert from the book:
Generally speaking, though, Americans have an inability to relax into sheer pleasure. Ours is an entertainment-seeking nation, but not necessarily a pleasure-seeking one. Americans spend billions to keep themselves amused with everything from porn to theme parks to wars, but that's not exactly the same thing as quiet enjoyment. Americans work harder and longer and more stressful hours than anyone in the world today. But as Luca Spaghetti pointed out, we seem to like it. Alarming statistics back this observation up, showing that many Americans feel more happy and fulfilled in their offices than they do in their own homes. Of course, we all inevitably work too hard, then we get burned out and have to spend the whole weekend in our pajamas, eating cereal straight out of the box and staring at the TV in a mild coma (which is the opposite of working, yes, but not exactly the same thing as pleasure). Americans don't really know how to do nothing. This is the cause of that great sad American stereotype--the overstressed executive who goes on vacation, but who cannot relax.
I once asked Luca Spaghetti if Italians on vacation have that same problem. He laughed so hard he almost drove his motorbike into a fountain. "Oh, no!" he said. "We are the masters of bel far niente. " This is a sweet expression. Bel far niente means "the beauty of doing nothing. " Now listen--Italians have traditionally always been hard workers, especially those long-suffering laborers known as braccianti (so called because they had nothing but the brute strength of their arms--braccie--to help them survive in this world). But even against that backdrop of hard work, bel far niente has always been a cherished Italian ideal. The beauty of doing noth- ing is the goal of all your work, the final accomplishment for which you are most highly con- gratulated. The more exquisitely and delightfully you can do nothing, the higher your life's achievement. You don't necessarily need to be rich in order to experience this, either. There's another wonderful Italian expression: l'arte d'arrangiarsi--the art of making something out of nothing. The art of turning a few simple ingredients into a feast, or a few gathered friends into a festival. Anyone with a talent for happiness can do this, not only the rich.
For me, though, a major obstacle in my pursuit of pleasure was my ingrained sense of Puritan guilt. Do I really deserve this pleasure? This is very American, too--the insecurity about whether we have earned our happiness. Planet Advertising in America orbits com- pletely around the need to convince the uncertain consumer that yes, you have actually war- ranted a special treat. This Bud's for You! You Deserve a Break Today! Because You're Worth It! You've Come a Long Way, Baby! And the insecure consumer thinks, Yeah! Thanks! I am gonna go buy a six-pack, damn it! Maybe even two six-packs! And then comes the reac- tionary binge. Followed by the remorse. Such advertising campaigns would probably not be as effective in the Italian culture, where people already know that they are entitled to enjoy- ment in this life. The reply in Italy to "You Deserve a Break Today" would probably be, Yeah, no duh. That's why I'm planning on taking a break at noon, to go over to your house and sleep with your wife. Which is probably why, when I told my Italian friends that I'd come to their country in order to experience four months of pure pleasure, they didn't have any hang-ups about it. Compli- menti! Vai avanti! Congratulations, they would say. Go ahead. Knock yourself out. Be our guest. Nobody once said, "How completely irresponsible of you, " or "What a self-indulgent luxury. "
But while the Italians have given me full permission to enjoy myself, I still can't quite let go. During my first few weeks in Italy, all my Protestant synapses were zinging in distress, looking for a task. I wanted to take on pleasure like a homework assignment, or a giant sci- ence fair project. I pondered such questions as, "How is pleasure most efficiently maxim- ized?" I wondered if maybe I should spend all my time in Italy in the library, doing research on the history of pleasure. Or maybe I should interview Italians who've experienced a lot of
pleasure in their lives, asking them what their pleasures feel like, and then writing a report on this topic. (Double-spaced and with one-inch margins, perhaps? To be turned in first thing Monday morning?) When I realized that the only question at hand was, "How do I define pleasure?" and that I was truly in a country where people would permit me to explore that question freely, everything changed. Everything became . . . Delicious. All I had to do was ask myself every day, for the first time in my life, "What would you enjoy doing today, Liz? What would bring you pleasure right now?" With nobody else's agenda to consider and no other obligations to worry about, this question finally became distilled and absolutely self-specific. It was interesting for me to discover what I did not want to do in Italy, once I'd given myself executive authorization to enjoy my experience there. There are so many manifestations of pleasure in Italy, and I didn't have time to sample them all. You have to kind of declare a pleasure major here, or you'll get overwhelmed. That being the case, I didn't get into fashion, or opera, or cinema, or fancy automobiles, or skiing in the Alps. I didn't even want to look at that much art. I am a bit ashamed to admit this, but I did not visit a single museum during my entire four months in Italy. (Oh, man--it's even worse than that. I have to confess that I did go to one museum: the National Museum of Pasta, in Rome. ) I found that all I really wanted was to eat beautiful food and to speak as much beautiful Italian as possible. That was it. So I de- clared a double major, really--in speaking and in eating (with a concentration on gelato).
The amount of pleasure this eating and speaking brought to me was inestimable, and yet so simple. I passed a few hours once in the middle of October that might look like nothing much to the outside observer, but which I will always count amongst the happiest of my life. I found a market near my apartment, only a few streets over from me, which I'd somehow nev- er noticed before. There I approached a tiny vegetable stall with one Italian woman and her son selling a choice assortment of their produce--such as rich, almost algae-green leaves of spinach, tomatoes so red and bloody they looked like a cow's organs, and cham- pagne-colored grapes with skins as tight as a showgirl's leotard. I selected a bunch of thin, bright asparagus. I was able to ask the woman, in comfortable Italian, if I could possibly just take half this asparagus home? There was only one of me, I ex- plained to her--I didn't need much. She promptly took the asparagus from my hands and halved it. I asked her if I could find this market every day in the same place, and she said, yes, she was here every day, from 7:00 AM. Then her son, who was very cute, gave me a sly look and said, "Well, she tries to be here at seven . . . " We all laughed. This whole conversa- tion was conducted in Italian--a language I could not speak a word of only a few months earlier.
I walked home to my apartment and soft-boiled a pair of fresh brown eggs for my lunch. I peeled the eggs and arranged them on a plate beside the seven stalks of the asparagus (which were so slim and snappy they didn't need to be cooked at all). I put some olives on the plate, too, and the four knobs of goat cheese I'd picked up yesterday from the formaggeria down the street, and two slices of pink, oily salmon. For dessert--a lovely peach, which the woman at the market had given to me for free and which was still warm from the Roman sun- light. For the longest time I couldn't even touch this food because it was such a masterpiece of lunch, a true expression of the art of making something out of nothing. Finally, when I had fully absorbed the prettiness of my meal, I went and sat in a patch of sunbeam on my clean wooden floor and ate every bite of it, with my fingers, while reading my daily newspaper art- icle in Italian. Happiness inhabited my every molecule. Until--as often happened during those first months of travel, whenever I would feel such happiness--my guilt alarm went off. I heard my ex-husband's voice speaking disdainfully in my ear: So this is what you gave up everything for? This is why you gutted our entire life to- gether? For a few stalks of asparagus and an Italian newspaper? I replied aloud to him. "First of all, " I said, "I'm very sorry, but this isn't your business any- more. And secondly, to answer your question . . . Yes. "
My thoughts:
And there it was. Written by someone who didn’t know me and has never met me and might never meet me… in a few paragraphs she had summed up something that has been bothering me, and pestering me like a fly buzzing around, for so long. I feel guilt. Correction, I felt guilt. There was a part of me that didn’t understand people’s reactions to my travels and the things they would say and the looks they would give. It was as if I was doing something wrong. While on the other side of the coin, when I was complaining about 60 hour work weeks, and bills, and stress, and bla bla bla, a bubble would form around me full of the woes of all these people. Was following my dream that horrible, was chasing after my goals with a butterfly net an insane thing to do, was I really that crazy to check off my bucket list? Reading this makes me realize that as a society, a western society, this is just another fact. And perhaps another reason I don’t want to live here. Being in my 20s I may not know everything but I’ve always known (from a very young age) that I just didn’t belong here. And this is one other major fact to add to the list. People here do not enjoy life. Period. And yes there are exceptions, this isn’t about you and what you’ve done to be the stand out guy, this is about a society. And here it’s all about working hard, debt, and 2 weeks of vacation. I don’t belong here; I belong in Europe, or Asia, or perhaps on an island. Just somewhere where pleasure is not earned, and not frowned upon, it’s just an accepted way of life.
I remember having constant moments of panic, of waking up thinking I slept through the alarm or that I misplaced my phone. Trust is that there was no alarm and I didn’t have a phone. I was free every day; I could do only what mattered to me and nothing else. I remember random moments of pure joy, so pure that I could cry just thinking about them; seeing the 12 pinnacles, new years in Sydney, my plane ride to Singapore, the Singapore zoo, dinner in Malaysia, playing Frisbee in Thailand, SHAVING MY HEAD… I remember slowing down to eat and enjoying food and perhaps tasting it for the first time, I remember going to bed at night alone and happy, I remember being able to sit and watch monkeys (at the zoo) for over an hour… and not explain or answer to anyone. It took me so long to get used to these pleasures and I truly hope it’s something I carry with me for a long time. I deserve to be happy and I deserve to enjoy life, and it’s ok if this society doesn’t feel the same way. I just need to keep smiling and carry on.
I am blessed enough to have someone who allows me to be me and who I can go to running and he makes it all better. My best friend always encouraged me always pushed me to follow my dreams and always reminded me about whom I was when I forgot. He’s like this book in real life. He’s the thing I am the most thankful for. And speaking of that, and thinking positive thoughts, I need to bring that part of my life back. I always used to take time to be thankful, and it’s unfortunate that I let it go. So starting now, every day, 3 things….
PART 1 EAT
The exert from the book:
Generally speaking, though, Americans have an inability to relax into sheer pleasure. Ours is an entertainment-seeking nation, but not necessarily a pleasure-seeking one. Americans spend billions to keep themselves amused with everything from porn to theme parks to wars, but that's not exactly the same thing as quiet enjoyment. Americans work harder and longer and more stressful hours than anyone in the world today. But as Luca Spaghetti pointed out, we seem to like it. Alarming statistics back this observation up, showing that many Americans feel more happy and fulfilled in their offices than they do in their own homes. Of course, we all inevitably work too hard, then we get burned out and have to spend the whole weekend in our pajamas, eating cereal straight out of the box and staring at the TV in a mild coma (which is the opposite of working, yes, but not exactly the same thing as pleasure). Americans don't really know how to do nothing. This is the cause of that great sad American stereotype--the overstressed executive who goes on vacation, but who cannot relax.
I once asked Luca Spaghetti if Italians on vacation have that same problem. He laughed so hard he almost drove his motorbike into a fountain. "Oh, no!" he said. "We are the masters of bel far niente. " This is a sweet expression. Bel far niente means "the beauty of doing nothing. " Now listen--Italians have traditionally always been hard workers, especially those long-suffering laborers known as braccianti (so called because they had nothing but the brute strength of their arms--braccie--to help them survive in this world). But even against that backdrop of hard work, bel far niente has always been a cherished Italian ideal. The beauty of doing noth- ing is the goal of all your work, the final accomplishment for which you are most highly con- gratulated. The more exquisitely and delightfully you can do nothing, the higher your life's achievement. You don't necessarily need to be rich in order to experience this, either. There's another wonderful Italian expression: l'arte d'arrangiarsi--the art of making something out of nothing. The art of turning a few simple ingredients into a feast, or a few gathered friends into a festival. Anyone with a talent for happiness can do this, not only the rich.
For me, though, a major obstacle in my pursuit of pleasure was my ingrained sense of Puritan guilt. Do I really deserve this pleasure? This is very American, too--the insecurity about whether we have earned our happiness. Planet Advertising in America orbits com- pletely around the need to convince the uncertain consumer that yes, you have actually war- ranted a special treat. This Bud's for You! You Deserve a Break Today! Because You're Worth It! You've Come a Long Way, Baby! And the insecure consumer thinks, Yeah! Thanks! I am gonna go buy a six-pack, damn it! Maybe even two six-packs! And then comes the reac- tionary binge. Followed by the remorse. Such advertising campaigns would probably not be as effective in the Italian culture, where people already know that they are entitled to enjoy- ment in this life. The reply in Italy to "You Deserve a Break Today" would probably be, Yeah, no duh. That's why I'm planning on taking a break at noon, to go over to your house and sleep with your wife. Which is probably why, when I told my Italian friends that I'd come to their country in order to experience four months of pure pleasure, they didn't have any hang-ups about it. Compli- menti! Vai avanti! Congratulations, they would say. Go ahead. Knock yourself out. Be our guest. Nobody once said, "How completely irresponsible of you, " or "What a self-indulgent luxury. "
But while the Italians have given me full permission to enjoy myself, I still can't quite let go. During my first few weeks in Italy, all my Protestant synapses were zinging in distress, looking for a task. I wanted to take on pleasure like a homework assignment, or a giant sci- ence fair project. I pondered such questions as, "How is pleasure most efficiently maxim- ized?" I wondered if maybe I should spend all my time in Italy in the library, doing research on the history of pleasure. Or maybe I should interview Italians who've experienced a lot of
pleasure in their lives, asking them what their pleasures feel like, and then writing a report on this topic. (Double-spaced and with one-inch margins, perhaps? To be turned in first thing Monday morning?) When I realized that the only question at hand was, "How do I define pleasure?" and that I was truly in a country where people would permit me to explore that question freely, everything changed. Everything became . . . Delicious. All I had to do was ask myself every day, for the first time in my life, "What would you enjoy doing today, Liz? What would bring you pleasure right now?" With nobody else's agenda to consider and no other obligations to worry about, this question finally became distilled and absolutely self-specific. It was interesting for me to discover what I did not want to do in Italy, once I'd given myself executive authorization to enjoy my experience there. There are so many manifestations of pleasure in Italy, and I didn't have time to sample them all. You have to kind of declare a pleasure major here, or you'll get overwhelmed. That being the case, I didn't get into fashion, or opera, or cinema, or fancy automobiles, or skiing in the Alps. I didn't even want to look at that much art. I am a bit ashamed to admit this, but I did not visit a single museum during my entire four months in Italy. (Oh, man--it's even worse than that. I have to confess that I did go to one museum: the National Museum of Pasta, in Rome. ) I found that all I really wanted was to eat beautiful food and to speak as much beautiful Italian as possible. That was it. So I de- clared a double major, really--in speaking and in eating (with a concentration on gelato).
The amount of pleasure this eating and speaking brought to me was inestimable, and yet so simple. I passed a few hours once in the middle of October that might look like nothing much to the outside observer, but which I will always count amongst the happiest of my life. I found a market near my apartment, only a few streets over from me, which I'd somehow nev- er noticed before. There I approached a tiny vegetable stall with one Italian woman and her son selling a choice assortment of their produce--such as rich, almost algae-green leaves of spinach, tomatoes so red and bloody they looked like a cow's organs, and cham- pagne-colored grapes with skins as tight as a showgirl's leotard. I selected a bunch of thin, bright asparagus. I was able to ask the woman, in comfortable Italian, if I could possibly just take half this asparagus home? There was only one of me, I ex- plained to her--I didn't need much. She promptly took the asparagus from my hands and halved it. I asked her if I could find this market every day in the same place, and she said, yes, she was here every day, from 7:00 AM. Then her son, who was very cute, gave me a sly look and said, "Well, she tries to be here at seven . . . " We all laughed. This whole conversa- tion was conducted in Italian--a language I could not speak a word of only a few months earlier.
I walked home to my apartment and soft-boiled a pair of fresh brown eggs for my lunch. I peeled the eggs and arranged them on a plate beside the seven stalks of the asparagus (which were so slim and snappy they didn't need to be cooked at all). I put some olives on the plate, too, and the four knobs of goat cheese I'd picked up yesterday from the formaggeria down the street, and two slices of pink, oily salmon. For dessert--a lovely peach, which the woman at the market had given to me for free and which was still warm from the Roman sun- light. For the longest time I couldn't even touch this food because it was such a masterpiece of lunch, a true expression of the art of making something out of nothing. Finally, when I had fully absorbed the prettiness of my meal, I went and sat in a patch of sunbeam on my clean wooden floor and ate every bite of it, with my fingers, while reading my daily newspaper art- icle in Italian. Happiness inhabited my every molecule. Until--as often happened during those first months of travel, whenever I would feel such happiness--my guilt alarm went off. I heard my ex-husband's voice speaking disdainfully in my ear: So this is what you gave up everything for? This is why you gutted our entire life to- gether? For a few stalks of asparagus and an Italian newspaper? I replied aloud to him. "First of all, " I said, "I'm very sorry, but this isn't your business any- more. And secondly, to answer your question . . . Yes. "
My thoughts:
And there it was. Written by someone who didn’t know me and has never met me and might never meet me… in a few paragraphs she had summed up something that has been bothering me, and pestering me like a fly buzzing around, for so long. I feel guilt. Correction, I felt guilt. There was a part of me that didn’t understand people’s reactions to my travels and the things they would say and the looks they would give. It was as if I was doing something wrong. While on the other side of the coin, when I was complaining about 60 hour work weeks, and bills, and stress, and bla bla bla, a bubble would form around me full of the woes of all these people. Was following my dream that horrible, was chasing after my goals with a butterfly net an insane thing to do, was I really that crazy to check off my bucket list? Reading this makes me realize that as a society, a western society, this is just another fact. And perhaps another reason I don’t want to live here. Being in my 20s I may not know everything but I’ve always known (from a very young age) that I just didn’t belong here. And this is one other major fact to add to the list. People here do not enjoy life. Period. And yes there are exceptions, this isn’t about you and what you’ve done to be the stand out guy, this is about a society. And here it’s all about working hard, debt, and 2 weeks of vacation. I don’t belong here; I belong in Europe, or Asia, or perhaps on an island. Just somewhere where pleasure is not earned, and not frowned upon, it’s just an accepted way of life.
I remember having constant moments of panic, of waking up thinking I slept through the alarm or that I misplaced my phone. Trust is that there was no alarm and I didn’t have a phone. I was free every day; I could do only what mattered to me and nothing else. I remember random moments of pure joy, so pure that I could cry just thinking about them; seeing the 12 pinnacles, new years in Sydney, my plane ride to Singapore, the Singapore zoo, dinner in Malaysia, playing Frisbee in Thailand, SHAVING MY HEAD… I remember slowing down to eat and enjoying food and perhaps tasting it for the first time, I remember going to bed at night alone and happy, I remember being able to sit and watch monkeys (at the zoo) for over an hour… and not explain or answer to anyone. It took me so long to get used to these pleasures and I truly hope it’s something I carry with me for a long time. I deserve to be happy and I deserve to enjoy life, and it’s ok if this society doesn’t feel the same way. I just need to keep smiling and carry on.
I am blessed enough to have someone who allows me to be me and who I can go to running and he makes it all better. My best friend always encouraged me always pushed me to follow my dreams and always reminded me about whom I was when I forgot. He’s like this book in real life. He’s the thing I am the most thankful for. And speaking of that, and thinking positive thoughts, I need to bring that part of my life back. I always used to take time to be thankful, and it’s unfortunate that I let it go. So starting now, every day, 3 things….
- I am thankful for my best friend, he makes me a better, stronger, more wonderful person
- I am thankful for books and my love of reading, so many times it has come to my rescue
- I am thankful for my grandfathers (May they RIP) if it wasn’t for them I wouldn’t have found writing, and a passion that I shall carry on forever.