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What is revelate?

It's a real word, trust us, though fallen out of use. It comes from the Latin revelatus, which means to reveal or disclose.

Those are verbs. Why THE revelate?

We chose THE Revelate because life moves quickly and can descend into chaos if we only ever focus on the things we do or think we want to do—think buy a bigger house, make more money, have greater sex! If we don't stop often and give thought to the purpose behind those pursuits, we can start to feel like we're languishing and not fully engaged with our life, which makes it more difficult to move forward or to know even what comes next.

Sorry. It's been a long day. I'm not really following.

Let's make it even more simple then. Newton's Third Law of Motion says for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. If A pushes on B, then B pushes back on A with the same force but in the opposite direction.

You think that's helping?

Bear with me. According to Newton—which everyone agrees knew his stuff—if you press on a stone with your finger, the stone presses equally back on your finger. The third law of motion is the reason planes fly, fish swim and balls bounce. Life wouldn't be the same without it. Forget about having the greatest sex, we wouldn't be able to even walk.

Speak for yourself. Now I gotta go.

No, wait. Okay, I admit got caried away. Making a noun out of a verb is not so simple. Neither is revelating. The point is we people want a lot of things out of life—Money. Relationships. Family. Rewarding work. And atop that mountain of achievement is happiness. It's like we don't just want to move one stone. We want to pick up an entire lot of them and put them all in our pockets so we can have them with us wherever we go. Sounds easy, right? They're just stones. Try it. Take a walk uphill with your pockets full of stones. It's anything but easy. In fact, I'd bet you'd hate it, and the reason you'd hate it is because at some point you're going ask yourself: What's the purpose?

And that is?

Happiness. Contentment. Being satisfied with the path we chose to live our best lives.

Seems like you're not really saying anything new.

Oh, we know we're not. We've all heard it before because it's true. We understood it to be true the moment we pulled ourselves up off the floor as an infant. And why? Because standing wasn't the purpose. Standing was just the beginning. Getting somewhere was the purpose.

It's how nature works. You push on me, I push back, together something happens. Or doesn't. It all depends. Nature wants easy. Nature isn't interested in conflict or argument. It just wants everything to be in a happy state of equilibrium, maintained by self-regulating processes. The problem is, people, generally-speaking, don't really like self-regulating processes. People want it all. The career. The family. The money and happiness. We want the big house in the suburbs with a sex-loving spouse and 1.93 kids but also not to feel a soul-crushing weight during our morning commute to the office.

Homeostasis? We're not really interested. Just read the news. We're trying to manipulate weather by shooting some cocktail of chemicals into the clouds that would encourage precipitation. Please. Encourage precipitation. Who do we think we are?

You're starting to sound like my preachy, peyote-smoking cousin from Albuquerque.

You should listen to her. The thing is we can't have it all. Nature won't permit it. Life, a happy, contented one anyway, requires self-regulation. The stone pushes back on the finger. To move it takes effort, and intention.

Still sticking with the stone thing?

Not stones, but people. Our selves. It's about choice and solving conflict and moving ourselves in the direction we most long to be. It's about doing the work to discover inside what matters most and then, with intention and a bit of audacity, pursue our own happy homeostasis. One that nature won't push back on. One that our own nature can agree with and won't have us knocking on the door to chaos.

Kind of like making it rain?

Nice one, but no. We're not looking to make it rain, but instead be content with the dryness.

What's all this have to do with Sicily?

Honestly, everything. But also nothing at all. Sicily is just the vessel. It's our place. Our revelation. Think of it as the ground on which the stones we want to move are embedded. Yours will be something else (or not). What we hope reading about our experience does for you is help you discover your own Sicily or Spain or maybe it's not even a physical place but a mental one, or one related to love or work or happiness. That (or those things) becomes your stone. It's up to you then to move it, or finally accept it and leave it where it is.