Life is a mess. An overwhelming mess sometimes, a glorious mess a lot of times, and occasionally it’s even an Eton mess (mmmmm, look it up, it’s delicious). But it’s definitely a mess. Covering up the mess with sickly sweet frosting to disguise the bitter parts doesn’t do it justice. What makes the good great is the bad, what makes the amazing miraculous are the harrowing struggles and pain we navigate through. Only when we truly embrace all the parts of life can we fully live.
We’re all humans barreling our way through our messy lives like reckless teenagers with a brand new learner’s permit, with the ambition to be free and achieve great things. The reality is usually not quite what we expected or dreamed, and sometimes it’s a complete shitshow.
My personal messy life has taught me that an essential part of navigating it is storytelling. Whether sharing a painful experience, recollecting a hilarious mishap, or describing the magical moments we will never be able to explain. Storytelling is the tool, the life language that connects us, heals us, brings us together and gives us strength and hope to keep going, for ourselves and for all the other reckless newly permitted teenagers racing around the roads of life around us.
I come from a family of storytellers. My maternal grandfather told exciting stories of the resistance in World War II France and his mundane but immensely entertaining stories of his shopkeeper life after. My paternal grandfather told his war stories from Africa and his family’s immigration to America aboard the M.S. Saturnia. Storytelling has always been an essential and dominant part of every family gathering, every reunion of friends or small get together. I suspect it is also part of every single gathering of two or more human beings across the earth and through the ages. We are all storytellers.
Some people find their calling as architects while playing with legos as a child. Others decide to be teachers based on their experiences in school. I have realized my forte is the laughter and contemplation I can inspire in friends, family or complete strangers. I have been doing it all my life without realizing it; sometimes I can be a slow learner. I didn’t realize it was my calling until the arthritis and aches and pains of my 50’s set in. Oh well, better late than never.
People of all kinds have always been my thing. I’ve loved telling them stories and hearing theirs, hopefully creating astonishment or laughter as a result. Inspiring or empowering them through storytelling. Like most people, I have lived a mundane life and an extraordinary life all at the same time. Storytelling exposes the similarities that are buried under our differences.
I realized that all my varied experiences added up to quite a load of tales that I felt needed to be told, so now I am telling them. Whether it is about racing through blazing wildfire fields in a Fiat 500 on the coast of Sicily, eating a pig I had just befriended days before, or stealing an expensive 18th century manuscript only to cut it into tiny pieces and flush it down a toilet out of guilt, I try not to hold back. If a story offends, so be it. Ifit makes you laugh, awesome. If it makes me look like a fool, even better.
Ultimately, all I want is to share stories with people, make them laugh, give them hope and empower them to share their stories with family, friends and with me. To appreciate life for what it truly is. Always looking to uplift, empower, console, share in nostalgia, shed a tear, rejoice in our commonalities and simply make life a tiny bit better.
Renato Passalacqua 