A Month in Rome
I’m still processing all that I experienced and learned as we stayed for a month in Rome this November. It’s going to take a hot minute to let it all filter down. I mean, it was a month, not a year, and I won’t be able to turn my one month into some kind of eatpraylove book. But having a whole month was also still pretty amazing.
If you follow me on Instagram you’ll have seen my probably obnoxious joy at play there. I’m hoping that the feeling was contagious rather than stifling, but I allowed myself every jot of it. Anyway, as Julia Child said about serving a dinner you’ve made, never apologize.
Thirty years ago, this coming May, we stayed in Italy for 5 weeks on our honeymoon and it was a time of such intense happiness. Ever since I’ve had it in my head to go and stay in Rome for a month. We’d made it to the 3 week point in 2018 and 2019, but this time it was the full four weeks. Decadent, right? I know.
In her book Index Cards, Moyra Davey, quotes someone saying that everyone should take a one year sabbatical — the person dares her listeners to “imagine what that would be like.” And I think the word “dares” is meaningful here, and maybe now especially. Because it did feel even quite daring to take a month (especially during a pandemic, admittedly). The idea, Davey says, is that everyone in their time on earth should get to experience an interval of just freaking joy. Just as Cixous talked about fecundity being the natural state for writers, I believe that the state of feeling joy and being delighted on a daily basis is a basic human right. Which of course is so hard to attain. But there it is.
And I don’t think we’re likely to feel delighted and joyful all day long or anything like that. But in my month in Rome, doing whatever we wanted every single day which included looking at amazing art, writing, photographing, being creative, really reset my beleaguered pandemic brain. For the last couple of years, I have not felt myself. I’ve hit some distressing levels of depression. I know I’m not alone in that.
And so, to live a month in utter happiness, contentedness, joy: I can tell you that it rewired my brain, reset my soul. Obviously, I want to keep those good vibes going. How? So that will be my ongoing quest.
I recently read A Horse at Night: On Writing by Amina Cain, and it was perfect for me. It’s about reading, writing, being. I loved it. A couple of things that really resonated for me. She says:
“In the last year I’ve become fixated on the idea of authenticity. This is partly because I feel at times I have lost sight of my authentic self, and I want more than anything to come close to it again, or at least feel close to it.”
There is the wish to be aligned — to feel connected with others but aligned in one’s own soul. And this just hits for me. Because I have spent a month feeling aligned, and back now for not even a week, and I can feel myself becoming un-aligned. And that just won’t do. I refuse.
She says in the book:
“I used to feel such joy all the time; I didn’t know it would change. I used to think that once you felt intense happiness, it would only grow stronger, that once discovered it would keep opening up and out, that experience was like this too, that life became more and more open to you. Naively, I didn’t anticipate a closing down.”
And I guess the pandemic has taught most of us otherwise, and yet, I remember feeling this so intensely, too. That I’d made it to this place of happiness with no small amount of effort, with no small amount of struggle. And I thought it was mine to keep. Or at least that I’d have regular easy access to it.
Of course it’s possible to believe a thing and simultaneously sort of know otherwise. I’ve been reading Pema Chödrön for too long, to not think more heavily about life as it is vs life as I want it to be. And so, Chödrön’s new book, with the wonderful title, How We Live is How We Die, is also timely. She talks about how people say, “Don’t worry it will all work out.” And she says, “But, so much of the time, we don’t get what we want, and even when we do, our pleasure is only fleeting. And much of the time, we get what we don’t want — ah, the vicissitudes of life.” True that. She urges us to, instead of resisting reality, to “learn to frame things in a new way, seeing our life as dynamic and vibrant, an amazing adventure.” As always with a book by Pema, I know I’ll be reading it over and over, and learning and re-learning the wisdom within.
I’ll leave off here, but I expect my one month in Rome will be referenced here again as a sort of touchstone for me. Thanks for reading along, friends.
