The Sicilian Graph of Life & Happiness
A common tradition in Sicily is the nightly gathering. After dinner and sundown, hordes of people carrying a chair from their own home wander the streets of our little Sicilian town like zombies. Their intended victims are family or friends that have either had a celebration, a big life event or have a visitor staying with them.
They wander the streets headed to someone’s house to park themselves on their chairs just outside the home, along with a fair number of other chair carrying zombies from all around town.
The gatherings are filled with conversation, laughter and arguments. A vast swath of subjects are smeared across the evening’s discussions, from ancient land ownership disputes to local politics to world chaos to love. Being Sicily, even if the talk is about bread flour, the conversation will be deep, impassioned and animated.
When we were there the gatherings inevitably would include conversations about America. To my family we were the returning explorers after a multi-year expedition to a far away lost land… and they wanted to hear every single detail of the adventure.
I felt embarrassed to tell them as for me it was my little life and didn’t feel extraordinary or even story worthy. To them, listening to my story of searching for a nice pair of jeans throughout lower Manhattan shops was as if I was recounting a hunt for a rare tiger in the wild African plains.
Inevitably I would try to steer the conversation away from me and America and back to Sicily. It is so human to always desire what we don’t have rather than appreciate what we already do have. The truth was that to me Sicily and the life they had was much more intriguing than mine in America.
One evening this led to a comparison of life and happiness between America and Sicily. I assured them that America was not as happy and carefree as it was portrayed in commercials or TV shows. My cousin would point out all the great things about living in America, giant movie theaters, shopping malls, big cars, skyscrapers, easy availability of jeans (this happened about 35 years ago when jeans were not as common in Europe), high wages and low prices of almost everything.
I would counter his life and happiness examples with the darker aspects of everyday American life, crime, violence, homelessness, job insecurity, overwork, poverty and constant wars. I didn’t realize that he was setting up the conversation to make a point.
I refocused on Sicily’s great qualities, which upon saying them out loud seemed much more quotidian and mundane compared to the ones he had just pointed out about America. I remarked on the old buildings, quaint streets, Greek and Roman ruins, long history, wonderful food and nice beaches. This is when he decided to visualize his point about happiness.
He proclaimed that the easiest way to understand life and happiness in America and Sicily was through a graph. He began to draw an invisible chart in the air between us with his hands. He first set up the horizontal line by spreading his hands apart and informing me that it represented a typical person’s life. He then used one hand low in the air to indicate extremely bad things, then raised it as far as he could to indicate extremely good things. He then began to draw the graph itself.
He placed his hand way up in the air to begin.
“American lives are like this. Extremely good.”
He then quickly moved his hand as low as he could go.
“And then extremely bad.”
He then repeated this as he moved slowly horizontally to form an invisible sine wave with very high tops and very low bottoms.
“Very good…very bad… very good…”
He relaxed himself and prepared to draw another sine wave on top of the first.
“In Sicily, our lives are more…”
He proceeded to start with his hand somewhere below the middle of the vertical extremes and drew a much more tame sine wave across the horizontal line.
“Like this.”
I have thought about that conversation and my cousin’s graph many times over the years and here is what I learned from it.
In America we live in extremes. Granted, in Europe it was much less complicated 35 years ago and they’ve closed the gap on us a bit through unfortunate imitation, but it is still much less extreme than here.
Because of these extremes we don’t seem to take the time to appreciate what we have as much as we should. We’re constantly off to the next thing, planning something new or doing something else. Rest, silence or peace seem to be a sin to us. Similar to the American custom of appearing constantly busy and productive at every single waking hour, it leaves us no time to think, contemplate or appreciate.
I have absolutely no proof but I do believe that this extreme way of living is a big contributor to the tragic state of mental health in America today. That theory will have to be explored another time.
My cousin believed that since Sicilians didn’t reach for the farthest stars in their lives they avoided the deepest abysses as well. Avoiding America’s constant striving for quantity which in turn eliminated most of the quality.
I think that conversation 35 years ago sparked an idea or vision inside me that I have yet to fully realize. For many decades now I found myself increasingly desiring what I call “the simple peaceful life”. People who hear me mutter the phrase assume what it means. To them it is avoiding problems, avoiding people and basically living a solitary life away from society and modern life. This is only partly true.
It’s more about simplifying your life physically, emotionally and philosophically. It’s about creating and surrounding yourself with peace, not an avoidance of disturbances and misfortunes, but a peace within them. Drastically reversing the concentration on extreme quantity and replacing it with much smaller quantities of authentic quality. Creating an environment, an existence that promotes the simple peaceful life.
In future I will continue to explore this idea of the simple peaceful life, flesh out what it truly means as well as work out a plan to finally make it become a reality. I hope by sharing it will help others who have yearned for their own simple peaceful life.
Renato Passalacqua 