I am overcome with the fact that we only get one chance - just one! - to live this life. Each decision we make eliminates hundreds of other options, which means that each moment has infinite potential to lead us to a different destiny.
My heart hurts from loving.
I had a crazy adventure this Sunday when four of us took a train into a tiny village outside of Turin to help my friend pursue a great beer from the restaurant where she drank it to the brewery where it was produced, and somehow our clumsy grope into this obscure corner of Italy got us into a private and exclusive pre-Grand Opening party for a new branch of what was already a flourishing establishment. I wish I knew more about beer so I could appreciate more deeply the once-in-a-lifetime-ness of it! We rubbed shoulders and clinked beer glasses with Italy's most notable brewers; toured the handpainted and entirely custom-crafted Casa Baladin, the nearby hotel; met the professional cartoonist who does all their graphics, the photographer who does all the pinhole imaging, the bartender who designed their website and the manager who will debut their men's fashion line in November. Outside the the rain fell ceaselessly while inside we drank our way to merry, flushed and uninhibited in a funky pub that likely none of you will ever visit. I was struck by the feeling of community I found there, among a group of old friends who happen to be perfectly suited for each of the niches of the business - financial management, dècor, advertising, brewing - and have thus been able to make money doing what they adore, together. Everything about the place emits a kind of light (yes, even the vegetarian pasta), for it has all been and continues to be produced out of love: the love of beer, love of travel, love of beautiful things and good company.
Driving me back to the train station, one of the co-owners told me he never graduated from college. And here he is at 45, wearing a navy designer leather jacket and driving a brand new BMW, holding third row season tickets at Turin's Teatro Reggio (home to one of the best symphonic operas in the country) for the 25th year in a row, working alongside his best friends to follow in the footsteps of America's fine brewers to bring artistry to the local beer industry -- and without a college degree. Everything I've learned, he tells me, I learned from the right people. They taught me how to be who I am at an early age, and I'm different from anyone else I know. These people continue to teach him, I'm sure, and he, them. I'm beginning to see the sense in forming artists' communities like the Bloomsbury group and other famous literary societies, because when surrounded by a group of people with the same information, moving in the same direction, you not only find yourself but tap into a stronger and swifter current; a current that has moved the great thinkers behind you and will surely move those who come later. Fifty years ago, Simon and Garfunkel produced a chart-topping album retrospectively described as "a meditation on the passage of life and the psychological impact of life's irreversible, ever-accumulating losses"; around 2am today, a good friend of mine emailed me,
[It’s] this precise love of the mysterious that draws me to the wise. . . . I don’t think that wisdom the answers [sic], but rather the sustained curiosity to investigate. And the full-understanding that there are things one will never know. And the learning and growth is thus endless. One day bleeds into the next and one journey turns the corner onto the following; time passes, and because one can never know when death will come, life has an enigmatic infinite discreetness.Whoa. Time - art - love - loss. The resonance of these themes over the passing months tells me that something must be done with, must be produced from, their repetition. I once worried that the great thinkers, authors, musicians, artists, were long gone, but I begin see that we are indeed in a continuum. There is a legacy here that moves across time and space and, without presuming to be omniscient or egotistical, I feel that I'm nearing one of the aforementioned currents. A society is beginning to form... I can feel distant pieces slowly orienting towards a common place, as the points of so many widespread compasses all trembling northward.
We are all telling each other's stories.
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