Grazie Italia!

I started packing my bags. I feel exactly like I did 8 months ago when I arrived to Italy for the first time to live one of the best periods in my life. But everything comes to an end and now it’s time to depart and search for other possibilities and chances on the other side of the Atlantic.

The last days I’ve been surrounded by this feeling of nostalgia that invades your mind when you know that something is coming to an end. I have lived amazing experiences in this country that I have loved since I was a little kid at school, and today I can finally say that I made it, that I went here and I experienced what it means to live in Italy, in a country that is also mine.

What’s the balance of these months? Absolutely positive. I felt part of this country and the things that happened while I was here.

I never felt excluded. In general, Italians are happy and warm people that make you feel like you are one of them without differences. Italy gave me the chance to get my residence here and to vote. So. I can say that I also voted 3 times as an Italian resident! I had the opportunity to go to Rome to celebrate the 150 years of the unity too!

In Italy I learned that being a good citizen and a gentle human being is more important than working long hours like a robot and being productive. I learned the importance of having good friends around that could help you in the moments of sadness and loneliness, when you start thinking about your relatives that are far away.

Italy taught me the importance of the smells, the tastes, the colors and the art. This amazing country taught me the meaning of belonging to a place, to a land that you can call yours and it could be a little town, a district or a city. Italian people have a very special relationship with their cities and the places where they were born. And that made me think that I also should be proud of who I am and the place where I belong.

I’m leaving and I don’t know if I will come back someday. But I thought this post was necessary as a tribute for the country that I called home for the last 8 months. Grazie Italia! Arrivederci

Five things I’ve learned by living alone

Eight months have gone so fast! Now I’m preparing myself for a new adventure, a new beginning.

In just ten days I will move to the place that will be my home for the next three months: New York. This has made me think about the amazing months I’ve had in Italy and all the things that I have learned.

With every experience we have, we grow and we change. Even if we don’t want to change, our mind and our senses absorb every little detail or fact and make it part of our background. Suddenly we see ourselves thinking in a different way, more mature, doing things we didn’t imagine we were going to do, speaking in a different language…and sometimes thinking in that language even if it’s not your mother tongue.

I consider myself a very analytic person and reflecting about the things that happen in my life is a sort of therapy. It helps me to put some order on my thoughts. That’s why I decided to write this post about the five things that I have learned in the past 8 months in my first experience alone:

 

1. There is no ideal place to live. Yes, that’s it! I came to Italy because I was disappointed of the Venezuelan situation: the violence on the streets, the corruption, the burocracy, the constant fear of losing everything you have worked for in just three minutes. Many of these things don’t exist in Italy and that’s great, but here you have different problems. Burocracy is as bad as the Venezuelan one, people think all the time in a negative way about the country and live in a sort of depression that goes beyond the economic aspect. Needless to say that the economy has hit the country very hard, especially the younger population. Many young and talented citizens, with a tremendous academic record, can’t find a decent job and sometimes they don’t get paid for what they do. Now I’m preparing myself to go to the United States and I know that it won’t be a bed of roses. There is also the economic crisis and I’m not an American citizen, so I will have to face discrimination and all kinds of prejudices. But, you know what, I want to try and nobody will stop me!

2. I can’t plan anything. I think I have lost a bit of the illusion of control. I always bring with me my agenda where I write everything I have to do for the rest of the week…even the most absurd and evident things. But it happened to me that two weeks ago I didn’t know really if I was going to obtain my Visa to go to the USA. I had to pay the rent of my apartment for the month of June and then I had to leave it because is going to be sold. So, I found myself in a very difficult situation because my life depended on someone else. I couldn’t buy travel tickets because I wasn’t certain about taking the plane, and I couldn’t start looking for a new apartment in Milan because I didn’t know if I was going to stay in the city. I just had to wait. Now I know I’m going to NY for three months. What will I do later? I don’t know. Time will give me the answer

3. I realized I’m calmer than the rest of people I have found here. Some of my new friends in Milan have told me that if they would have faced what I have in the last months (the uncertainty about my future) they would have become mad. The fact is that I was really worried about my internship in New York, but I have learned that certain things are not under our control. So, if you can change things, do it! If you can’t, don’t worry because it’s not your fault and you can’t do anything about it.

4. I am more open to other cultures than many people I have met. In Venezuela, I was always complaining because people tend to be very focus about national issues and they ignore other cultures or what’s happening outside of the country. I have realized that in Italy the situation is not better. Here I have found people that don’t know where Venezuela is or people that ignore that Toronto is part of Canada and not the USA and so on…Now in America I know I will find the same situation. So, I have to thank God and my parents because I think they gave me a good education background that allows me to interact with people of Latin America about our problems and also understand European political dynamics and how the North American system works. And believe me, if you are studying International Relations, the ability to communicate with different cultures and to understand what they are expecting form you is a plus

5. Last but not less important…I have learned how to cook, how to wash my clothes, how to rent an apartment, how to prepare a bag, how to choose my flatmates and how to start somewhere else from zero. And that makes me very proud.

So, do you have some experiences like this? I want to hear from you. Please, leave a comment.

The Illusion of Control

Today I want to share with you this article I read on the Zen Habits blog, which I completely recommend. This article arrived to me in a very important time in my life.

I really needed to read something like this that day. Sometimes, we are so busy planning our life that we don't realise that we are like the feathers in the Forrest Gump film...we are moving with the wind. Enjoy your reading!

The Illusion of Control

Post written by Leo Babauta

When you think you control something, you’re wrong.

It’s amazing how often we think we’re in control of something when really we aren’t.

Control is an illusion, as I’ve said many times before.

We constantly make plans that never actually turn out the way we envisioned. ‘If you want to make God laugh, make a plan,’ an old saying goes.

We have been trained to set goals, and then work on the actions that lead to those goals … and yet how often do those goals fail? How often are we trying to control a future that we cannot predict?

Did you know five years ago that the world would turn out as it has — that Obama would be president, that the stock markets would have crashed, that we’d be deep into a recession, that earthquakes and tsunamis would hit, that you’d be doing exactly what you’re doing today?

Of course not. We don’t know the future, much less control it. We like to think we do, but that never turns out to be true.

And yet we continue to believe in the illusion of control. We face a chaotic and complex world, and seek to control it however we can.

Our attempts to control the world can be seen through:

•Trying to control how our children turn out, as if we can shape them like blocks of clay, as if humans aren’t more complex than we can possibly understand.

•Tracking every little thing, from spending to exercise to what we eat to what tasks we do to how many visitors are on our site to how many steps we’ve taken today and how many miles we’ve run. As if our selective tracking can possibly include the many, complex factors that influence outcomes.

•Trying to control employees — again, complex human beings with many motivations and whims and habits that we don’t understand.

•Obsessively planning projects, trips, days, parties, as if the outcomes of events are things we can control with our powers of manipulation of the world.

If we can let go of this illusion, what are we left with? How can we live among this chaos?

Consider the fish. A fish swims in a chaotic sea that it cannot possibly control — much as we all do. The fish, unlike us, is under no illusion that it controls the sea, or other fish in the sea. The fish doesn’t even try to control where it ends up — it just swims, either going with the flow or dealing with the flow as it comes. It eats, and hides, and mates, but does not try to control a thing.

We are no better than that fish, yet our thinking creates the need for an illusion.

Let go of that thinking. Learn to be the fish.

When we are in the midst of chaos, let go of the need to control it. Be awash in it, experience it in that moment, try not to control the outcome but deal with the flow as it comes.

How do we live our lives like this? It’s a completely different way of living, once we let go of the illusion:

•We stop setting goals, and instead do what excites us.

•We stop planning, and just do.

•We stop looking at the future, and live in the moment.

•We stop trying to control others, and focus instead on being kind to them.

•We learn that trusting our values is more important to taking action than desiring and striving for certain outcomes.

•We take each step lightly, with balance, in the moment, guided by those values and what we’re passionate about … rather than trying to plan the next 1,000 steps and where we’ll end up.

•We learn to accept the world as it is, rather than being annoyed with it, stressed by it, mad at it, despaired by it, or trying to change it into what we want it to be.

•We are never disappointed with how things turn out, because we never expected anything — we just accept what comes.

This might seem like a passive way of living to some, and it’s against our aggressive, productive, goal-oriented cultural nature. If you can’t accept this way of living, that’s OK — many people live their lives with the illusion of control, and not realizing what it is that makes them unhappy or frustrated isn’t the worst thing ever.

But if you can learn to live this way … it’s the most freeing thing in the world.

http://zenhabits.net/control/