The Downtime

By Esterina Anderson

When Daren and I first got here to Italy five months ago, and Daren got the blogging bug (I’ve been blogging for over 10 years), we reframed my WordPress site around our Italy experience and created three areas on that page: My Experience/Posts, Daren’s Experience/Posts, and Our Travelogue.

If you haven’t seen it because you get the blog in your email, it’s EsterinaAnderson.com.

At first we did post separate things, but for a long time now we’ve pretty much only used the joint Travelogue section.

Why am I saying all this? Because this post is from me (Esterina) and belongs completely under the Esterina’s Posts button. This isn’t one of the posts we both edited together, so I don’t want to rope him into this.

We came to Italy to take a break from life and see how other people live.

When we first started tossing around the idea we are now living, the main goal was to step away after retirement, work on my citizenship, and see what happened. And that break is happening.

Our mornings are slow to start. Yoga, then coffee and the New York Times games together. Then often some exercise and computer work. We talk—a lot. Most of the day. We talk during meals, during errands, and on our many long car rides as we travel. This was the goal. To connect, ponder, and explore.

The conversation has shifted and changed since we got here. Initially we thought we might want to do NGO work, maybe in Africa or the EU. Citizenship certainly would open more doors for us to do those things. We also initially considered really ramping up and expanding our small consulting company. Those talks have now evolved into different conversations.

We talk about deep and spiritual things. We talk about how we want to spend the rest of our lives, who we want to be, and how much, if any, work we want to do for profit. We are doing a lot of reading for fun, but also a lot of reading about Life Part II and spirituality. The books we both read, whether novels or not, we talk about often for hours—how the characters behave, who or what they remind us of, and things the other person might not have considered. We talk about experiences we’ve had, both together and separately, and what we’d do differently now. We talk about the similarities and differences between the U.S. and Italy, what we like about each, and what we don’t like about each. We fuss over Koji. We talk about how we want to show up for the people we love.

These conversations have become really important and might just be a keystone of how, in years to come (assuming I’m lucky enough to have years to live), I look back on this time here.

I know from our blogs it probably looks like all fun, games, traveling, and bliss. But there is another side to what we’re doing. It’s not as glamorous, it’s hard to explain, and it has nothing to do with frescoes, churches, or sightseeing. It’s what happens in between, while we are shopping and going to the comune and to the veterinarian.

While I love traveling, the glitz and writing about it have fallen to the back burner for me. We’re mostly going to tourist cities, and for the most part they are very similar. Walled cities with souvenir shops, gelato, and churches. These places are indisputably beautiful, but they’re honestly starting to feel like a lot of the same. Luckily, our next few planned trips are a little more off the beaten path, and the places that aren’t will be with friends who are coming to visit.

In case I haven’t said it before (if you’ve talked to me, you’ve heard it!), I am really tired of Italian food, and it’s almost all we can get while traveling. Daren keeps writing that we eat different things whenever we go to cities, but we don’t go to cities very often. We used to eat Indian food at least once a week, and I think we’ve had it four times since we’ve been here. We can cook different things at home, but even that’s limited. The grocery stores are very large, but not as diverse as I expected.

I’m also really struggling with the cadence of life. The riposo is a bit of whiplash for me. From a non-Italian or non-Spanish perspective, it initially sounds cozy, romantic, relaxing, and family-oriented. Riposo (like a Spanish siesta) is the afternoon break when many businesses close for a few hours. It wasn’t created to inconvenience anyone. It grew out of a culture that values a long midday meal with family, stepping away during the hottest part of the day, and then returning to work later into the evening. It’s a rhythm that made a lot of sense long before air conditioning, supermarkets, and 24-hour convenience became normal in the U.S. and other European countries. But I’m finding it a little depressing. The streets are empty. Stores look like they’ve been closed since the Dark Ages, with metal gates over the doors. The piazzas empty out. It feels like a deserted ghost town.

The riposo and lack of air conditioning go hand in hand. The buildings are made of heavy stone with small windows, so many places are naturally dark. The shutters stay closed to keep the heat out, which means even less natural light. I’m used to bright, open, airy spaces with lots of sunshine, so this doesn’t fit with my natural circadian rhythm, and I find it difficult. I know what I need to do, and I do it. But I haven’t gotten used to it, and I’m struggling a bit.

I’ve been feeling a little off. We were up until 2:00 in the morning Friday night at the opera, and I slept terribly that night. Then I slept poorly again last night because I was overtired. After a mid-afternoon nap, I had a nice break to reflect on how I’d like to say this (which I am doing now).

When I woke up, I just lay there and thought about nothing… in the heat, with the sound of a fan blowing. It reminded me of when I was a kid in Brooklyn and later on Long Island, before we had air conditioning, or when we would only turn it on for a little while during the day. There was nothing to do and nowhere to go. The days felt so long. It felt free. Someone else took care of dinner and the bills. The day would be ahead of me. I’d wake up, lie in bed, and just think about nothing in particular while I listened to the fan blowing.

Today was like that. I need this in my life. Everyone should be fortunate enough to take a (what Daren is calling) sabbatical in their mid-life at some point.

I wanted time to reflect, to think, to decide what to keep and what to let go of—in what I think, what I own, what I do, and what I want to do. While riposo isn’t my cup of tea, it is helping me not “go, go, go” all day and instead take an afternoon break.

Retirement adjustment is a real thing. I knew it wouldn’t be some kind of amazing transition. I wasn’t sure what to expect and this is all part of it.

I’m not sure exactly what I’m trying to say, except that there is much more going on here than what shows up in our Travelogue. While this kind of sounds like a Seinfeld show (in that it’s about nothing), there is so much more than the eye can see in the nothing. There’s been a lot of soul-searching, a lot of downtime, and a lot of adjusting to a different way of life. Some parts of it I think I’ll carry home with me. Other parts I’ll happily leave behind. I don’t think the grass is greener anywhere else, but I do think it’s worth seeing that there are other ways to do things, even in two first world kind of similar countries. I feel blessed to have this experience even though most days do not look like the blogs you read! And I have to say I’m gladder than you would think that the actual experience is not exactly as it may seem in our posts. The nothingness is really where the treasure is for me. And that is something I will always carry with me no matter where I am standing in the world.

Namaste,

Esterina