Mid September. We are now officially halfway through our initially planned, committed 13-month stint in Italy. A few days ago, I was sitting in a beautiful park in Puglia. This was my view.
Beautiful, right? But it was almost as though I could only look straight ahead. The second I turned my head, breathed deeply, or paid attention to anything outside the photograph, some of the magic disappeared.
What you don’t see in that photo is the trash near my feet or the ants crawling all over me. You can’t tell that I’m sitting on dirt packed so hard that the towel underneath me offers almost no relief from the little rocks poking through it. You can’t smell the cigarette smoke drifting by or feel the dust being kicked up from the dry ground as people bustle past my towel. You certainly can’t feel the roughly 90-degree heat or the sirocco blowing in from North Africa and wrapping everything in humidity. None of that makes the photograph false. It just means the photograph has a frame. And there are many things outside the frame that cannot be seen.
Experiences like this, outside the frame of the beauty, took me by surprise initially. When I talk to anyone at home and express some of the frustrations or talk about things that are less than ideal, the first answer is usually, “But your photos are so beautiful!” Then they start telling me about how beautiful Italy is. Some have been here, some haven’t. Media and Hollywood have contributed to the American perception of the country. I wondered if I’m part of the machine that does that too.
On a separate but completely related note, I have been thinking a lot about the concept of Satya, or truthfulness, these days. Satya is part of the Yamas and Niyamas, which are kind of a guide to broad-minded, healthy living through a yogic lens. Mostly for fun, my friend Michele and I are writing a book on the Yamas and Niyamas in the workplace, so I’ve been thinking a lot about what truthfulness really means.
The same evening this photo was taken, Daren, two friends and I went to dinner in the old part of the town of Gallipoli. Daren and I had gone for a run through this area earlier that morning, before the busy time of day. It looked like a ridiculously charming fishing village. Fishermen were repairing their nets and a few people were sweeping the streets and getting ready for the day. By evening, it had transformed. The streets were packed, every shop was open, restaurants and cafés spilled into the streets, and lights reflected over the water.
The four of us at dinner are all retired (for lack of a better word). Three of the four of us finished our last day of paid employment before turning 50. In some way, we are probably all figuring out how to spend the rest of our days in a meaningful way. While we were sitting at a restaurant overlooking the water in yet another postcard scene, Daren asked the four of us a question.
Do you miss work? And if you do, what do you miss about it?
While everyone answered (myself included) and shared, I let this question marinate through the evening and into the next morning. In all honesty, I don’t really miss my job, but the question made me realize that I miss being completely excited and energized about something the way I once was at work. Because for a very long time, I loved my work.
Sometime along the path of my career, I had a job that changed my relationship with work for good. There were too many meetings, I felt increasingly removed from the mission of the organization, and there were what felt like way too many things that frustrated me. But one thing bothered me more than everything else, and it came up while I was writing the Satya chapter on truthfulness. We sometimes kept people hopeful about things we already knew were very unlikely to happen.
We didn’t lie. We said maybe. There were understandable reasons for it. We didn’t want people to become discouraged or walk away. We wanted to preserve relationships and keep people engaged. Saying “maybe” avoided a difficult conversation. Except that sometimes “maybe” wasn’t really true. People were spending their time doing work based on information we were giving them. They were planning around possibilities we knew were barely possibilities at all. Eventually, I found it increasingly difficult to participate in what felt like a charade. I stopped loving work and being excited about what I was doing.
What was marinating in my mind alongside the beautiful photo I took while ants were crawling on me and I was practically choking from the dust and cigarette smoke was this question: Can what we say or share be technically true and still leave someone with a false impression? I mean, yes, of course! But do we realize the impact that it has when we do this and that people are basing their impressions, decisions and work, on it?
This is what has been bothering me about Italy and the reaction I get when I share the not-so-perfect moments with others who are not here. Nothing I’ve posted about Italy is untrue. The flowers really are spectacular, the quaint towns are picturesque and adorable, and some of the food is extraordinary. The ancient streets, the evening passeggiata, the cafés, the vineyards, the olive trees, the old men sitting together in the piazza—all of it exists.
The photographs and blog experiences are real. But so was the “maybe” at work. Sometimes something can be completely true and still leave out enough of the story to give someone the wrong impression. I lost my appetite for work by participating in what felt like a charade. I don’t want to do that with sharing anything about my retired life. But how do I do that in modern day without posting pictures of dirty diapers, half built buildings and graffiti? Of course we’re going to photograph the beautiful sunset instead of the overflowing garbage bin twenty feet away.
I am bothered by the concept of Satya (that yogic concept of truthfulness) and impressions because I think we also arrived here with a story already written. We’re moving to Italy for a year. That sentence practically comes with its own Instagram filter. Italy is romance, reinvention, pasta, Tuscan hills, walkable villages, slower living, long dinners and flowers pouring from ancient stone windows.
Then we actually lived here. It has been six and a half months now. Living somewhere is very different from visiting. When you live somewhere, you need doctors and pharmacies. You realize that the walkable village requires parking outside ZTL zones and can be a big hassle. You deal with government offices, use the trash system, drive, and need things repaired. We experienced the brutality of the summer heat and smelled cigarette smoke in places I haven’t smelled it since I was a child. We have been immersed in extreme overtourism. We haven’t eaten more than a handful of non-Italian (mostly terrible-tasting) meals in more than six months. We are experiencing the systems behind the scenery.
Two opposing things can both be true, and that is the part I didn’t understand until I lived here. That is what living somewhere does by forcing you outside the frame.
The morning after that dinner and Daren’s question, while the ideas about work, Italy and truthfulness continued to linger; I walked Koji along the same path we had walked him the prior evening. Along the promenade the night before, the water was glowing, and people were everywhere—walking, eating, drinking, talking and laughing. Lights from restaurants, cafés and amusement park rides reflected off the water.
Even though Koji and I walked that very same route, in the light of the morning it looked and felt different. I noticed the trash, the broken glass, the tall grass that hadn’t been cut, and all the things that darkness and twinkling lights had made invisible the night before.
When I ran into the same old city even earlier the following morning, I noticed the overflowing trash, the street sweepers who were distracted and hardly paying attention to what they were missing, the broken cobblestones that I tripped over and all kinds of things I initially filtered out. Same run, just a different set of eyes. Neither experience was untrue. It’s the same city, same walk, same run. So why or how do I see it differently at times? And what am I sharing that gives people an impression that isn’t the whole story and might leave them with a false impression of what something is all about?
Daren and I are intentionally spending much of our time talking, reflecting and thinking about how to live intentional, meaningful lives going forward. Between our conversations and the book Michele and I are working on, I am thinking a lot about what happens when all our individual selections and the things we leave out or don’t say accumulate into a story. How much of a story did I buy into about a people, places and things in my life and how did my experience measure up?
How does what I chose to show leave someone with an honest understanding? Because that was precisely what bothered me about maybe: it wasn’t a lie, it just wasn’t the whole truth.
The opposite of romanticizing a place isn’t criticizing it (which is my first instinct, to be honest!), but perhaps we need to allow things to be whole and full of the nuance they inherently have. Our Italy story doesn’t become less beautiful when I include what has disappointed me. It becomes more honest.
Italy does have spectacular hilltop towns and overflowing garbage bins. There are extraordinary meals, food fatigue and some really terrible overpriced meals. Universal healthcare exists, but so do truly frustrating healthcare experiences. There are absolutely gorgeous places and lots of unkempt public areas. There is truly remarkable history, UNESCO sites and maddening bureaucracy steeped in that same history. Warmth, beauty, neglect, generosity, inefficiency, tradition and contradiction all exist side by side.
None of those things cancels the others out. My photos are not untrue, but they are not giving anyone the full picture of what goes unseen. What part of that is Satya and being truthful? Am I/ are we misleading anyone?
I try via the blog to tell a bigger story, but some people may scroll past the words to look at the pictures. Why do we do that? Why at work did we tell people maybe and lead them to have hope about something that had a small chance? Why didn’t we tell them what the chances were? Do people want to have hope that something better is out there? Daren and I always wanted to live in Europe. Why? What impressions did we have that were not entirely true?
As I try to share that I am no longer loving the ideal of Italy, but getting to know the actual place, I see people almost defending their own idea of what it is. Wanting to keep the hope alive that there is something better out there, that the grass is greener, that the “maybe” could be true.
While I don’t have answers to these questions, these are the kinds of conversations we spend our days having while doing laundry in the sinks of hotels, sitting in traffic, shopping in grocery stores with nearly empty shelves and coughing on cigarette smoke. We also have these conversations by pools, on gorgeous scenic drives throughout the country and over long meals that extend long past sundown while lights come on and illuminate the town like a gorgeous painting.
Countries are nuanced. Workplaces are nuanced. People are nuanced too. Don’t we do this with people too? We meet someone, fall in love or have a hero, and then that person disappoints us by being human. We feel shocked that they don’t meet the ideal that was only in our head due to the filter, the partial picture they showed us, or the one we were willing to see. Is it human nature to have something be all or nothing? Why are we not just looking at and accepting the full picture without attaching to or longing to put it in a category that we either like or don’t like?
This is what living in Italy rather than visiting it is like for me, and it is expanding my understanding of life and, of course, travel. When we travel somewhere we’ve romanticized, especially as tourists, much of what we experience has already been framed for us. We visit the historic center, eat at the recommended restaurant, photograph the piazza at sunset, walk the beautiful streets and leave a few days later. We don’t usually stay long enough to need much from the place beyond what it was already very good at giving us.
When we spend enough time to see past that, like when we spend enough time with a loved one or an idolized hero, we see the whole picture. While it might not be what we expected, it is the truth, and I want to be someone who is honest in following the Satya principle.
We don’t have to pretend the flaws aren’t there, nor do we have to abandon our affection the moment we see them. We can admire someone without requiring them to be perfect, be disappointed by something without rejecting the whole, and acknowledge what is difficult or ugly without somehow betraying what is beautiful. When something finally comes down from its pedestal, we don’t necessarily love it less; we get the chance to know what we’ve actually been loving and love it more.
As for this halfway point in Italy now… There are things I adore, things that make me crazy, things I expected, things I completely misunderstood and things I still don’t understand. It’s a wildly less romantic story, but a more loving, honest and truthful one.
Thanks for reading! The feature image is a dog park at a rest stop.
We’d also love to hear from you! Any of you. Tell me what you think or what experiences like this you can relate to. You can comment here in the blog or email or text either one of us.
Namaste.