Here, because why not?

There is a saying that nothing worth having in life comes easy. It’s one of those unnecessary tips people offer sometimes that should rarely, if ever, be spoken aloud, because it’s something all adults, even if they have lived just a little, have learned and of which, unless you’re behaving like a toddler, shouldn’t need reminding. It’s like asking a butterfly if it ever has a bad day. Some things are just understood. 

Unlike butterflies, however, human life is messy. It’s messy partly because we make it so, with all our wants and needs and demands, many of which extend waaaayy beyond our needs and availability. But also because the world we live in is full of illusion and contradiction and the masters of mankind want us to believe that other people have hacked life in a way that is just… better. They both beg the question: Where in hell did I go wrong. 

I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.—Henry David Thoreau

Even Thoreau, with his woodland escape, enjoyed only occasional separation from society (often at the chagrin of others). Such is the reach of friends, neighbors and acquaintances. And today, with the long arm of the internet, the breadcrumbs these connections leave in our path dishing advice are not always helpful. Questions of How and Why and Since When are too big to ignore when it comes to deciding things for yourself. You don’t have to have left the meadow to know that a forest lies beyond.

Which, I think, is why I feel stymied when asked why had we chosen Sicily to move to and more specifically, why Troina. As if we, too, had discovered one of those secret “life hacks” and were now being asked to come clean.

Welcome to Part Three of the series where, at the sake of offending everything-Rilke, I’m going to attempt to scratch out an answer before having fully lived the question: Why Troina?  

Spoiler: There’s no secret sauce

In Part One I offered a broad analysis of the cost of living in Sicily compared to several locales in the US. (here’s a broader scale for anyone interested). For Part Two I looked at the town of Troina specifically, the location, the accessibility to nature, the sea, the food and wine and the people, the friendships we’ve made. I concluded with the suggestion that maybe the question we should be asking ourselves was not Is Troina good for us, but are we good for Troina.

Having spent more time now thinking about it, coupled with the recent loss of two people, one of them close to me and the other an entertainer who had lived his life like a song, I've come to the conclusion I was mistaken. Troina isn’t part of the math at all. The question we should be asking ourselves (and perhaps the one others should be asking of us, too) is How was moving here good for us? 

But damned if that question doesn’t lie at the tail end of a long list of undeserving distractions—those breadcrumbs again. Illusions. Contradictions. The internet—all posing what the poet Mary Oliver called the intimate interrupter—that “self within the self, that whistles and pounds upon the door panels” promising us as an easier go of our time if we’d just turn our attention away from whatever meaningful-but-challenging task we’re engaged in and turn ourselves over to the interruption.

How much more pleasant getting things done is when you’re not actually getting things done.

Really, it happens all the time. I just did it in fact, while writing this sentence, to reconsider the way I use social media (speaking of distractions) as if How to Instagram will be only a mere thirty second pause in the real work of the day). 

It reminds me of a scene from the TV series Fleishman is in Trouble, on Hulu. In it, Libby, one of the three main characters (not a Fleishman), is lamenting over how poorly she “wears her life”. Here’s a cut, if you’ve not seen it:

The scene is pretty pivotal to the overall story and while the sentiment shared by everyone’s entry into the obligations of adulthood (watch it and you’ll know what I mean), it’s Libby’s monologue just before it that steals the scene, at least for me. It's here she’s says to a sleeping Jesse Eisenberg, aka Toby Fleishman:

“How did we all get this way? How did we all get put on this trajectory, where we all end up in the same boring life. I miss longing. I miss desire. The way that it works, the way desire works, the way longing works, is you cannot get the thing. When you get the thing you don’t get to feel those feelings anymore. Am I the only one that enjoyed feeling those feelings?”

Now that’s a great question. In each of our cases, it might go something like this: Is moving here in response to desire or longing? 

Not as to the point as Why Troina, but you see the difference, I hope. 

Take this list of things we wrote down that delight us for example (sorry if you’ve seen it before, I encourage you to create your own):

Are these the same as longing? I’d argue yes but that’s not what's important. What's important is that there’s a list to begin with and that we’re giving that list our attention. First, by writing it down, and second by finding ways to delightfully incorporate it into our lives. This is what Libby is talking about in that scene. How poorly we often wear life because of the weight of obligation. Or as Franca once put it herself: “of not seeing with the heart what’s important”. 

What does any of this have to do with our choosing Troina over the many other places in Sicily we could’ve chosen? 

It doesn’t. And maybe that’s the point. 

Why Here? Why Not?

We were recently visited by some friends who kicked the city life for a Little Cabin on a small rural farm in western Virginia. Their life sounds amazing there—chickens, dogs, ducks, beautiful guest house, woods and water—but also it sounds like a lot of work. We’ve done some of that ourselves in our past lives and the word I would use for me personally is distraction. But they love the hell out of it. Why? I haven't asked specifically, but I imagine it's because moving there has ignited a sense of longing in them. Something they both strongly desired.

At this stage of my life, I couldn’t imagine waking each morning to that (though a few days would provide for a number of joys on my list). Fortunately, I don’t have to, they do. This is their longing, their desire. And it's awesome for them. Just think of how many people you know who surrender, not to longing, but to its opposite, the obligations of adulthood. The boring, monotonous bullshit that drives us all crazy and keeps us up at night, but that we find so hard to quit. They never make the move. They follow the breadcrumbs and never ditch the fucking city.

There's a reason the tag line of this newsletter is Longing, Purpose and Place. Following your heart's desire is that important. We’re in Troina because we’re in Troina. It could just as easily have been somewhere else had we not discovered friends, found a house we loved, and checked off a number of things on that list that bring us joy. If our friends move on (of which a few have) and if the house turns out to be nothing like we had imagined (it's a zillion years old so who knows), we may regret the decision. For sure, having a clean, comfortable, and accommodating place to live is very important to us. Had we not found it here, I don't know, I’m not sure here is where would’ve settled and we’d be having this conversation around some other town in Sicily, Italy, or who knows where.

Final Words

So, there you have it. Maybe when people ask Why Troina, I'll just tell them because we came to Sicily once for two weeks in 2017 and the longing for more filled us both with a dream and that dream felt amazing. 

Will it always feel that way? I don't know. At the moment, neither of us can imagine that our being here, permitting ourselves to spend more time on those things that bring us joy, will ever feel normal.

But looking over the list just now, I had the sense that maybe we should update it. It's not so much things have changed, though where we do them certainly has, but that, I think, is the true beauty of longing: Something new can pop up at anytime, sometimes out of nowhere, but more often they show up wherever you are.

You just have to be wearing your life in a more joyful and comfortable way, snugly and securely, to recognize it. Kind of like a butterfly.

How do you manage to remain focused on things you most want out of life? What techniques do you employ to not let yourself get crushed by the pressing weight of the many obligations of our modern world? Drop your thoughts in the comments.

And now, if you'll excuse me, I hear a cappuccino calling.

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