Anecdote 2: quest physics

Tube stops: Castro Pretorio

I walked to my language school the other day, picking up some folders for my last week of teaching and bumped into a few teachers who I hadn't seen since the start of the Summer holiday period. The meeting was bittersweet: I feel uncomfortable telling people I have now decided to go back to London, as if I truly tasted the forbidden dream of escaping to an exotic land to settle down and found it wanting. The exact opposite is true - the path revealed to me the things that I needed to move onto a new period in my life, to become "myself" more, an individual in control of my destiny, becoming fearless. As the film 'Eat, Pray and Love' (take a look at the trailer) says - whilst being a frightening accurate reflection of the parts of my life leading up to, and during my stay in Italy*:

In the end, I've come to believe in something I call "The Physics of the Quest." A force in nature governed by laws as real as the laws of gravity.

The rule of Quest Physics goes something like this: If you're brave enough to leave behind everything familiar and comforting, which can be anything from your house to bitter, old resentments, and set out on a truth-seeking journey, either externally or internally, and if you are truly willing to regard everything that happens to you on that journey as a clue and if you accept everyone you meet along the way as a teacher and if you are prepared, most of all, to face and forgive some very difficult realities about yourself, then the truth will not be withheld from you.

* One of the milder examples of how this film seems overwhelming autobiographical is that when Liz is sitting in the bath learning Italian, she is using the exact same dictionary as me. Freaky.

...

It has been tough - I learnt things about myself that I truly did not want to acknowledge and I discovered potential I didn't know was possible, lying in the depths of my immature understanding about the journey of life we undertake every day when we wake up, get up, attempt to grow, experience pleasure, forget pain, move on and come home to relax, sleep and dream again. And hit "Repeat". Bittersweet, conflicting emotions, difficult choices but always the understanding of your own capacity to experience all these profound experiences together, which make us alive.

I left the school with my head swimming in the afternoon heat, my bag light with the only folder that I'll need in my last week of teaching. The familiar Via Po seemed like a series of cardboard shop fronts pasted against a blue plastic background.

I passed a Italian guy in the street, young, dressed casually, laughing and smiling as he attempted to lead his pet dalmatian down the street by his leash. The only problem was that this dalmatian was clearly a Great Dane cross-breed and about as big as him. Defiantly, the dog held his ground, to the amusement of passing office workers, and turned its head away as if to say: "Today, I don't go any further. I've being doing this walk for years and years and finally I'm sick and tired of it."

"Yeah", I thought as I passed by with a bemused grin, "we all get like that sometimes."