Italy 2025
My first time in Italy was a solo trip. With two months of Italian Duolingo in my pocket, luckily backed by years of Spanish, I embarked on my journey. Without much of a plan other than booked lodgings, and a rough outline to meet with a friend, I meandered aimlessly and allowed happenstance to reign. And I'm glad I did.
It turned into a trip with lots of walking, clocking in at an average of 25k steps a day. It gifted me moments of presence that let me soak everything in, nourishing the parts of me that get starved in the daily to-do lists of life back home.
The trip was punctuated with nuance rather than big monumental strokes gesturing at the "greatest hits of Italy". It was textured with things like: noticing a woman and her dog walking in the heat and their aging hairs matching, peering into a Renaissance painting and seeing the intricate reflections on the materials of a sleeve, tasting a fig fresh picked off a tree in a field, you get the point.
Purposefully slowing it down helped me appreciate the time and intention of life lived in between. Hayao Miyazaki in an interview with Roger Ebert famously spoke to this:
The time in between my clapping is ma. If you just have non-stop action with no breathing space at all, it's just busyness, but if you take a moment, then the tension building in the film can grow into a wider dimension.
-Hayao Miyazaki
I'm glad I didn't pack it in, and instead let myself savor my surroundings. In the slowing down, it really did feel like I existed in a wider dimension.
Fin.
