What a Spontaneous Trip to Florence Taught Me About Growth

Podcast Transcript:

Welcome to the Pattern Breaking podcast.

Last weekend, my husband and myself and my daughter, we all took a trip to Tuscany to visit one of my dear friends who has a life similar to mine in the sense that we both met while interning here in Rome at the Rome Sustainable Food Project, which is the

dining project that Alice Waters founded at the American Academy in Rome.

So we met here back in 2017 and have stayed in touch and kind of lives here, both with Italian husbands and now with children that are the same age. both, she has a son and I have a daughter that are the same age.

you know, my family, we're in a bit of a period of transition where we're actually headed back to Ohio in just a few days. And she's due to have another baby in May. So it was very important to me that we

that I saw her while we're here ⁓ for just a few, you know, just a short period of time, see her while she's pregnant, since I won't have the chance to see her, you know, when the baby's

So we went to visit them there in Tuscany and spent the most beautiful Saturday with them.

We got up early and explored the town of San Gimignano, which if,

you're not familiar is a medieval town in the hills of Tuscany that is known for its towers like fortress castle towers right if you can picture this and people say it's like it has you know the most iconic skyline in Italy or something like that but the city has 14 towers that rise up out of this like hilltop village medieval village

very iconic, small medieval town,

you know, I love that, visiting my friend, I also get to visit places like San Gimignano. So we got up early and explored San Gimignano and then we went and had lunch together at an agriturismo, so a restaurant, farm restaurant in the countryside with a view of San Gimignano in the background. And the kids got to visit

got to see cows up close in person for the first time. They let us come into the barn and see the cows up close. They were behind some kind of corral structure. So it was safe for the kids to get close but not touch. It was really special.

it was already having this moment of like, what is my life? This is so amazing. And then,

After lunch, we were like deciding what we wanted to do because there was the afternoon, the kids needed to nap. We decided we would reconvene later in the evening and have dinner together at Kat's house.

But we had three hours there in the afternoon and

So he had proposed, my husband had proposed that we take a quick trip to Florence

visit just like really quickly with a good friend of his who lives there.

After I got in the car and got comfortable and Paloma fell asleep and I could kind of relax, I was like, you know what? Let's do it. Let's do it. Let's go. What else do we get? We're gonna just waste three hours sitting in the hotel room and looking at our phones while Paloma sleeps. Like, no, let's go. So we drive to Florence

as we're arriving at the place where we're gonna meet his friend and his friend had his daughter with.

with him. She's five years old, so older than Paloma, but still young enough that, you know, they could connect.

as we arrive, or as we're driving to where we're going to meet them, we literally drive down the street that I lived on when I was a student in Florence back in like 2008.

so first of all, that's kind of bizarre, right? To be like, wow, here we are, like right exactly back where I was all those years ago, a very different earlier version of myself.

And let me just give you a sense of this because,

so I grew up in like a small town in Ohio, you know, it's like very improbable for me to have

my way to this life living in Italy. And even more improbable than I would find myself back in that exact place, like completely spontaneously.

And especially, like to give you a sense of how it felt to be there back in 2008, I living there, you know, felt like I was on the other side of the world, felt like I was in this faraway place. Like I had to, I couldn't even use the internet in the apartment that I was staying in there. I had to go to the school where I was studying and use the computer lab there. Like that is the kind of times that it was back then. So.

You know, my experience of Italy back then was of this very captured and contained moment in my life. One that I lived and left behind and longed for. One that the memories of it kind of felt like ghostly and like kind of haunted me. The like just beautiful memories of a time that I would never return to. And yet here I was like returning to that very place.

just completely spontaneously. So already this is like bizarre.

so we meet up with Andrea's friend and his daughter and we decide we're gonna meet them at this park, a park with a big play area for kids. So it was perfect for us to kill some time there and kind of gather ourselves to figure out what we wanted to do next. And I'm there in this park that's literally just steps away from the place that I...

lived for, you know, four months or something. This place where I felt like I had a neighborhood that I got to know. I felt like I really lived there, you know, I would go to the market every day and buy vegetables and cook at home and like this was really the first time that I felt like I was living in a city.

it was a formative time for me and yet

And yet here I was back in that place, just steps away from where I had been living. But I had never in that time that I lived there, set foot in that park. I'd never even walked past it. I had no memory of it. And then again, we walked just a few short steps and we were in this piazza that was a vibrant and there was like cool coffee shop and there was like, you know, like.

hipsters enjoying coffee and a cigarette outside. And we walked down this very vibrant street to go ⁓ have a gelato with the kids. like,

there's my daughter, my two and a half year old daughter holding hands with his five and a half year old daughter. And it was just like the sweetest, most magical moment, watching them walk hand in hand to go get an ice cream.

I'll never forget the look on my daughter's face, that like timid, happy look.

And I never walked down that street either. And yet it was right by where I lived. And so I was in this like, just having this moment of reflection of like, how small my world was back then. How even though I was out exploring and felt like I was having this great adventure,

How

I found my beaten path there, right? The path that was between the place that I lived and the school that I was attending at the time. And how little I deviated from that.

How

there were things right beyond that that were mine to explore, but I didn't even go there.

I didn't take a different path. I didn't walk somewhere just for the sake of walking there.

And it makes me realize how

small my world once was,

how simultaneously I thought that my world was expanding, but that it was so much more, there was so much more there for me than I had any awareness of, or even the capacity to find,

And so I tell you this because

realization is that like,

Even with that small awareness, even with that limited experience that I had of that place, even with that small worldview that I had at that place, at that place in time, I somehow moved forward, circled again and again back to this thing that called to me this

love that I found for Italy and I find myself living here and just spontaneously on a Saturday back in that place, that exact place that I once lived.

I don't think that we realize how powerful our desires are,

how powerful small experiences are.

and how we set in motion future

even when we come to it with this small, naive worldview.

So let me tell you one more story from that time. So on the exact street that I lived on, which was, I believe it's called Via Fiesolana.

so on this

Down at the end of this little narrow street, there was this mysterious shop and...

you know, for many of the months that I lived there, I walked past it and just kind of was curious and wondered.

don't remember exactly what the sign said on the outside,

it was something to the effect of Rocco's Tea Room or...

Actually, I did look it up and it's called, and I'm remembering it now, it's called Mago

So, Merlin the Wizard is the name of this tea room. But I was mystified, like, know, magnetized to the name tea room and

magnetized to the like, mysterious air that this place had about it.

That I could tell that it was decorated with like,

collected things that had been collected from all over the world, from India, from Morocco, like all over the world. And one day my friends and I, my roommates and I got brave enough to go ring the doorbell at this place and see what was inside. And we get, we, you know, we enter this place and it smells of like spices and tea and it's dark and really dimly lit and there's,

like I said, decorated with things from all over the world.

was a room with cushions on the floor and like Hindu deities decorating the walls, like, you know, not your average hangout. And there was a piano and there was this guy whose place it was and his name was Rocco. So we have tea with Rocco and maybe some cookies or something.

You know, and he sits down with us and just starts talking with us, because we're the only people in the

And

don't remember where the conversation went, you know, he was kind and just was interested in kind of getting to know us.

a certain point, we move over to the piano and he starts playing the piano. And I don't know how, but like...

When I was in high school, I had this weird phase where I got really into Dean Martin, like listening to Dean Martin and singing along to all those like old crooner songs. And of all things, he started playing the song on the piano, Everybody Loves Somebody Sometime.

Like, I don't know, somehow being in this weird Bohemian tea shop, I felt like I opened up and like I started singing along with him. So I sang this song, you know, I sang along with Rocco as he played the piano. And afterwards, I will never forget, I don't remember specifically what he said, but I will never forget how he made me

He said something to the effect of,

was remarkable. You're so open, but I can still feel that you're afraid of the world.

And I'll never forget that, you know, that being like that jarring moment of somebody telling you that they can tell that you're afraid of the world.

especially somebody who clearly had traveled and explored the world and it was meaningful even from a stranger, essentially,

have that reflected back to me.

then I reflect on that moment and there I was on that very street where I had that experience.

where I was told that I was young and naive and I was afraid of the world. And I didn't deny it at that time. I knew it was true.

But then years later, to be back on that exact street and to have a real lived sense of how much I would go on to explore, how much I would go on to learn,

small my experience of that place was back

literally I did not step beyond.

my beaten path by just a few blocks to explore the real Florence. The path that I walked was between...

this

little side street that I lived on and the city center where I went to school. The side street that I lived on in the shopping area, the side street that I lived on in the tourist area, right? This is where my beaten path was in Florence. But just a few steps beyond that was a real piazza where kids were playing, where families were hanging out, where people who actually lived there were living their lives.

And I didn't explore that back then. I didn't experience that back then. I got tastes of it, but I didn't, there was so much that was just beyond the tip of my nose.

And so I think that the lesson in this, thing that I want to, I want you to take from this is how...

we settle into safe patterns, how we settle into the patterns of what is safe to do in our day-to-day lives,

how our brains filter

for what's right in front of us and

many alternate paths that are outside of that narrow point of view that's familiar.

You know, I don't know the exact statistic, but I was once told by a

that we have to realize

our brains are powerful filters of reality and that we are only consciously aware of an infinitesimally small amount of reality and how if we were actually

consciously aware of all of the inputs to our senses.

that there are at any given moment, that it would be profoundly overwhelming. And so our bodies, our brains filter everything really strongly for us. that lens by which we filter things is something that we can train, is something that we can tweak and something that we can develop a capacity to increase and experience more.

You know, I think of

clairvoyance and things where some people have an ability to perceive things that...

are questionable to others. Right? Like, is that reality?

I feel that it is, but that's a topic for another podcast.

the point of this is that like, even with your filter on,

You are capable of creating so much when you move towards your dreams. You are capable of expanding your experience of reality to be beyond your wildest dreams. In my case, it looks like a spontaneous trip to Florence in three hours on a Saturday, just to see our friends for a few minutes and have an ice cream and leave.

And it makes me sad. It makes me emotional because I think of when I lived there and how I longed to be able to have my parents experience that place and how it felt like it would be something I would never get to show them. I did eventually get to bring them to Italy, not specifically to Florence, but I took them to Venice.

and how I never imagined that I would live here, that this would be my life, and yet it's what I called in for years. So don't discount how powerful your intentions are, how powerful it is for you to move inch by inch closer to your dreams, how powerful it is to even if it requires you to go and deviate from that path and move away from that dream for a while, how you can

always circle back and how circling back to things, getting distracted and coming back to something, doing something completely unrelated and coming back to something, that that winding, circuitous path is a form of consistency in and of itself and builds and compounds, even if it seems like it's not straight and linear and therefore feels ineffective or...

Like a side quest. The side quests are part of the compounding journey, are part of the path.

and how not to make ourselves wrong for being small, for being beginners, being naive.

for feeling imposter syndrome, for knowing that your path is valid,

for knowing that

it all starts here.