Halfway

14:38. October 14, 2011. Astor Café/My Apartment in Firenze.
Somehow I am already halfway through. At first the days seemed to go on forever and the semester seemed like a lifetime, now though, standing squarely on the halfway mark, it all seems like a mass of time that rolled through my life kind of like that boulder that rolled through the tunnel in Indiana Jones and The Raiders of the Lost Ark. Now I’m standing at the halfway point of this tunnel, shocked I managed to make it here, and I have absolutely no idea what adventure might lie ahead of me.
I found myself in a bar the other night deep in conversation with a friend I met a few weeks into my time here. We were trying to assess just what it is that makes Florence special and how we could somehow not do that thing where you go away and have an amazing experience and then you come home and before you know it your life rescinds back into exactly what it was before you left. A simple question: How can a person retain change? My friend says that it’s all in the little things; it’s your cup of coffee accompanied by fifteen minutes of pure and unencumbered time. It’s the ten extra minutes you take to make hot chocolate from scratch rather than pouring a packet of Swiss Miss mix into a cup of water. It’s the red-cheeked little old man in the newsboy cap that plays violin outside the Duomo. It’s those seemingly expendable entities in your life that just, for whatever unexplainable reason, make you happy. Florence is full of these little treasures. The trouble is I only have four months here and back home there’s a whole life waiting to fall right back on my shoulders. I’ll have papers to write, books to read, people to see, floors to clean, obligations, responsibilities and work to do. There’s no time to drink fifteen minute cups of coffee, to make non-instant hot chocolate and to watch adorable old men play violins; these things are the time wasters in my life – the things I do while I could be more productive and adding something to society.
Yet I don’t know that this is so. I know I have things to do and history to make but I am also a person and underneath my busy life I’m a little weary and hoping that some sliver of time might fall into my lap. Am I the only one? I just want a little time for these little things. These little things that matter far more that most of us allow them to.
I’m only halfway through and I have so many more lessons to learn but I hope that my Swiss Miss days are behind me, I hope that when I’m 30, and 45, and 70 years old I can sit for fifteen minutes and have a cup of coffee because I learned to allow myself that during the semester I spent in Italy when I was just 20 years old. Even though people might tell me that I shouldn’t, I hope I remember what I’m learning now. I hope I change and stay changed because I think that if I can permit myself the time to do those little things that make me happy, I can add to the world in a way that only a person who allows themselves these little things can and that is where I want to make my history, it’s the place in which I hope to stand when I reach the end of the tunnel.
The whole experience so far reminds me of my favorite Shel Silverstien quote, something I was lucky enough to have both parents read to me several times. (I must thank you for those bedtime stories mom and dad, I hope that they were your “little things” because I know that back then, they were most definitely mine.) My parents told three and four and five and six year-old me, “Listen to the mustn'ts, child. Listen to the don'ts. Listen to the shouldn'ts, the impossibles, the won'ts. Listen to the never haves, then listen close to me... Anything can happen, child. Anything can be.” So here I am mom, dad and anyone else who’s happened to read this far, I’m halfway through… and anything could happen, anything could be.