Four Seasons in Rome

No, I'm not headed off to Rome for a year.

Anthony Doerr did, as part of a year-long artist fellowship he won. He, his wife and six month old twin boys traveled from their home in Idaho to an unknown apartment in an unknown city in an unknown culture speaking an unknown language (except the four hour crash course in Italian he took on a Saturday morning before they left). The journal he kept during that year became this book, Four Seasons in Rome.

"A good journal entry - like a good song, or sketch, or photograph - ought to break up the film that forms over the eye, the finger, the tongue, the heart. A good journal entry ought to be a love letter to the world."

The stories of their walk through the four seasons there, a few blocks from the Vatican, is subtitled, On Twins, Insomnia, and the Biggest Funeral in the World. Beyond recording the events, the adjustments, and the challenges, the book, for me, is a lesson in How-to-Journal.

"A journal entry is for its writer; it helps its writer refine, perceive, and process the world."

The five senses are recorded throughout - a means he uses to process his memories, and a vibrant way for the reader to be involved in the scenes he records. Sights, smells, tastes, touch, and sounds - all carefully, thoughtfully woven through his words. Standing shoulder to shoulder with mourners as the pope dies, and later, pushing their double stroller through the crowd of celebrants as the new pope is chosen. Describing to a baker, the rich bread smells around them, the focaccia bread he wants to order, misunderstanding the frustration, realizing later he was asking, in his broken Italian, for grapefruit sauce. Discovering new foods, making new friends, listening to the language, learning to understand it. Hunting down those vivid details, linking them together to build a sequence of thought, to "stay alert to the miracles of the world."

"A year is an infinity of perceptions: not just the shapes of starlings and the death of the pope and watching our sons learn to walk, but the smell of roasting meat in an alley, the dark brown eyes of a beggar on a church step, a single dandelion seed settling soundlessly onto the habit of a nun who is riding the train. This year has been composed of a trillion such moments; they flood the memory, spill over the edge of journal entries. What is it physicists tell us? Even in a finite volume, there are an infinite number of points."

In a way, this is discouraging. An infinite number of points? How could I ever catch them all? But that's not the point. Grab one. Grab two. Catch three. Record those vivid details, link together the sentences that help a reader (and me, the writer!) to see, smell, touch, taste and hear a world of beauty and miracles.

Anthony Doerr quotes Marilynne Robinson,

"There are a thousand thousand reasons to live this life, every one of them sufficient."

I think of Mary Oliver's poem,

"PAY ATTENTION
BE ASTONISHED
TELL ABOUT IT." 

Keeping a journal has been important to me for years. I have a box of old journals stashed in a closet. Never for publication, but for me to thumb back through if I am looking for notes, or find when something happened, or just for browsing. This book, Four Seasons in Rome, is not only an interesting read of their year as a family, as an artist, as an author, as part of a community, but also of the way he perceived and responded to the world around him, brilliant at capturing those images, and how he stayed alert to the miracles of the world. Now, when I write in my journal, I pay attention - not just recording feelings (as in emotions), but capturing a moment in time, using the senses as a means of paying attention, and searching for the right words.

I tried to find a good example of how he incorporates the senses in his sentences. It is an overall impression he leaves. I would call his journals, Impressionistic Journaling. Like the impressionist painters that paint in various dots and smudges and blends of color, but leave a distinct image on the canvas, he paints images with his words that leave a distinct image. Powerful, beautiful writing.

"Everything is radiant. Distant trees toss, faraway walls gleam. The mountains at the horizon have switched on like streetlights, stark and defined, giving way to more distant ranges.
Then everything goes dark again, the clouds knitted together, the mountains sucked back into silhouette, Rome sinking into shadow."

Windshield Goals

We have reached the end of February. Do you look at your New Year goals like this? Something you wrote down two months ago, part of the New Year planning, and now they are behind you. Unaccomplished. History. Looking backward instead of forward.

Donald Miller, on his Storyline blog, wrote a week long series, "Start Life Over." In the introductory post, he writes about the value of change, and he quotes two friends of his who own a successful restaurant. They said, "Life should be viewed similarly to how we look through the windshield of a car...the windshield is much larger than the rearview mirror."  Don adds, "Keep looking forward. Know where you are going and steer the car toward something new and exciting. And you can't do that if you're always looking in the rear view mirror."



I realized how often I think of my goals with a backwards thought. Guess that didn't work. What was I thinking? So much for that unrealistic time-frame. All those unfriendly failure words spoken in my head. But, instead, if I see them as Windshield Goals, the perspective changes. I am looking ahead, out the windshield, the road in front of me rather than behind. Any smart driver will tell you this is a much better way to drive - look through the windshield rather than the rear view mirror. Good driving involves a glance in the rear view mirror, but the attention is focused - forward. Of course, we say. But do we live that way?

Each day, on my daily list, I write my three main Windshield Goals as a reminder that I can take steps today toward them. Not big things, just little steps. And it moves me toward them, rather than seeing them disappear into the past, faded in the rear view mirror. The skill of resilience has its foundation in this, this ability to focus forward rather than on events of the past. How to navigate the next turn, the upcoming curve in the road? Focus ahead. Pay attention.

Sometimes, Windshield Goals can look like this. Blurred. Low visibility. Confused. Wish you were somewhere else. I took this photo last May. On the way home from a beautiful spring mountain drive, we encountered a surprise storm. Unexpected. Sudden. But we made it home, following the lines on the road, slowly, one mile at a time.

What if we looked at our goals as something in front of us? Ahead.

Forward looking.

Forward living.

Not full of regret or that sinking feeling, failed again.

Hope. Possibility. Do-able.

Try again.

Forward living. 

A much better choice.

This post is linked with Emily Freeman and Chatting At the Sky,

What We Learned in February.

Instead of feeling a failure, instead of those sinking regrests,

I can move forward.

For me, this is a huge lesson.

As Don said in his post, these paradigm shifts can change the way we view our lives, and the way we live our lives.

Green light ahead, GO!

A Measure of Value

"The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it."

                                                                                                        -Henry David Thoreau


When you hear the word, "Price," do you immediately think of money? I do. This quote reminds me there is a deeper way to evaluate value.

The measure of value, the standard of value in our culture is usually based on how much it costs. Dollars and cents. Does that make sense?

What is, "The amount of life," and how do we exchange it?

Time is one way. How much time we give something is one way to determine its value. Time is something we all have, probably in more abundance than money, although it may not feel like that some days.

There are several  quotes about spending our money on experiences rather than on things. That the value we put on experiences rather than filling our lives with things will have more lasting value, give us a fuller life.

There are many questions to ask here. What do I value most? How do I express that? What amount of life am I willing to exchange for what I value the most? When I hand money (or swipe the debit card) across the counter, I am giving up something, for something else.

Warren Buffet - a guy who knows a little bit about money - said, "Price is what you pay. Value is what you get." Interesting thought. Not thinking in terms of what I am getting, the thing itself, but instead, think of its value, to me, to our family, to our home, to life, to the world.

How will its value express what is most valuable to me? Lots of questions, no answers. Just ideas to think about.

How do you define value, how do you perceive value?