Week 8 of 54 — Those Who Don't Come Down from the Mountain

I've been in India for a few days now.

For those who've just started reading me, I'll say this only once: I'm not here looking for anything. I'm here for work, and I ended up here by chance.

I say this because I'm not a fan of "going on a trip to find myself." In fact, it's a completely useless cliché.

I was in a village up in the mountains, at the foot of the Himalayas, the greatest boundary that exists. (read the previous letter here if you don't remember what boundary means ;) )

I was in this small village, a thousand inhabitants.

Really, there's nothing there.

Not little. Nothing.

One road. A few houses. A woman cooking outside, over a blackened pot, with a gesture she's repeated I don't know how many times.

Children playing with a piece of pipe, dogs, and even monkeys jumping from house to house as if they were family.

And no one looking elsewhere.

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I stopped there for ten minutes.

And in those ten minutes something happened to me that hadn't happened in a while: I noticed that my brain had nothing to do.

There was no decision to make. There was no email to answer. There wasn't even a ready metaphor to write in this letter.

Just people who lived where they lived, did what they did, and didn't seem to have any intention of wanting anything else.

And that's when the question arrived that hasn't let go of me since.

▎ Do they live well, and that's it? Or do they live well because they don't know you can do something else?

Put more honestly, and more uncomfortably:

▎ Are they the ones who understand something that escapes me? Or am I the one who understands something that escapes them?

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I've always given myself the same answer. The one I can today define as "easy."

"They don't know. I know."

I've seen other cities. I've seen other lives. I've seen what's behind the mountain. They haven't.

So it's natural that they're still, it's a choice they've never had to make, they don't even know they can make it.

Except that evening in the hotel, while I was trying to just look at the ceiling — something I can never manage — it occurred to me that this answer is too convenient.

Because actually the question isn't what they've seen.

The question is: which of the two is better off now?

And honestly, I don't know.

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I've spent my whole life chasing a next version of myself. The second company. The next country. The new idea. The evening when everything will finally make sense.

That evening never comes, by the way. I'm saying this for those who are in the same loop.

The village people aren't chasing anything.

Not because they're enlightened. Not because they have hidden wisdom. I'm not romanticizing, I'd be yet another tourist coming back from India saying life is simple — I hate that framing.

They don't chase anything because they're not interested.

Period.

And this thing, seen by someone like me, is almost more alien than a language I don't understand.

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Let me try putting it in two columns, because when something confuses me I always need to see it written down.

I'm leaving the last two rows identical on purpose.

Because that row, "have no dreams to fulfill," read from one column is a defeat. Read from the other it's peace.

Depending on where you stand, the same sentence is either condemnation or liberation.

---

I remembered, while watching them, an eight-year-old boy.

He had grown up in a town of a thousand inhabitants, in Italy, and ran around the streets from morning to evening with another piece of pipe.

That boy is me.

And I don't recognize him.

I don't say this for emotional effect. I say it literally: I can't get into his brain. I don't know what he thought. I don't know what made him laugh. I don't know if he was fine or if he already wanted to leave.

Between him and me there are too many flights, too many cities, too many versions of me overwritten one on top of the other like layers of paint. When I try to scrape them off, underneath I don't find him. I find the emptiness of someone who never really protected him.

For years I told myself it was a beautiful thing — look how much I've built.

Now, among those thousand Indians who don't want to go anywhere, another thought came to me. More uncomfortable.

Maybe I didn't lose him to build. Maybe I lost him because staying still scared me too much.

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One thing I can't convince myself of, though.

I can't convince myself that staying would have been better.

Because in all these years I've also seen people like those in the village — physically still, intellectually still, existentially still — and inside them was another restlessness, identical to mine, except they didn't have a way to express it, or maybe they had just found a vice to suppress it.

Many of them dreamed in their heads, and that's it. They didn't take the field.

And that, from the inside, is a harder life than all the others. A life of private dreams that will never see light.

▎ Life, in the end, is this: understanding what we dream, and deciding whether to dream it inside our head or fight to build it in the field.

Tertium non datur, as the Romans said.

Either you live it inside, or you live it outside. You can't do it as an external spectator to both.

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So I don't have an answer.

Maybe they understand something that escapes me. Maybe I understand something that escapes them. Maybe neither of us, and we're just two different adaptations to two different background noises.

The only thing I really understood, in those ten minutes, is that my brain doesn't know how to stay still.

And that probably this is my price. Not my talent.

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I want to close with a question. I'll leave it here for you, I'm stealing it from the four AM taxi where I asked it of myself.

When was the last time you were still?

Really still. Without the next step already loaded in your head, ready to start as soon as you finished your coffee.

Still, in your moment of life.

If the answer is I don't remember, we're in the same column.

And maybe (maybe) it's worth asking yourself before the next flight.

Creation, "momentum" exists precisely in those moments there.

While you read this letter I'll be on a flight to Brazil, for the next chapter.

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Fifty-four attempts to become better.

This is the eighth.

Best, Stefano.

Next week: "we come down from the mountain."

Fifty-four attempts to become better.
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