A road of roads

Since the 5th May this year it feels like I haven't stopped a second. Work has taken me to New York, Hong Kong, London and Singapore and then back to Sydney, in a whirlpool of meetings, face time, self selling, arguing with colleagues, seafood Laksa, experiencing one of toughest times in the 360 year history of my company,  spending time with friends including a random glass of champagne in a hotel room, not enough time spent with friends, missing Patata, surprises like those surprises that come out of a box,  and dozens of hours spent on planes watching movies, listening to Glee albums (somehow they seem to be the right backdrop to my flights), writing unfinished poems and promising myself that I will indeed become that exceptional human being I was always meant to be. In between I turned 32, we have had guests and family over and we faced summer, winter and eternal heat and I took my mother to see Mamma Mia. She stood up and danced. Before that I saw a sunrise that reminded me of South Africa, listened to a taxi driver telling me that women drive either too carefully or recklessly whilst speeding down a busy Asian street, and thought that I was not sure whether I liked being called 'sir' and then pondered for half an hour on why that made me uncomfortable.

It is strange to compare winter 2012 to last year's. Last year I was in full on hibernation, watching all series of Buffy in our rental flat and waiting for summer to come. I watched Buffy like there was no tomorrow, and the night outside was dark and the cars circled us all over again, leaving us on an island of traffic and light. We watched Buffy. I like the series with Gloria as the antagonist. She $hits all over the other baddies.

Blue Mountains

For the Queen's birthday public holiday this year we have opted for a mini break to the Blue Mountains.  These are a beautiful national park 1hr 30minutes or so drive from Sydney, to the west. They are called blue because the eucalypti forest secrets oils that in the heat evaporate and this mist reflected in the sunlight appears blue.

It is a great place for trekking or just relaxing, and being so close to the city it is a good option for getting away from it all without having to stress too much about it. There is also some sort of Old England charms to the towns in this area, which have got some great tea rooms and cafes that offer great scones and food.

A key destination in this area is the town of Katoomba, which can also be reached easily by train. Katoomba is famous because of the Three Sisters, a 900 meters or so beautiful rock formation towering over the Jamison valley. The Aboriginal story tells of three sisters that were turned into these rocks by their witch doctor father in the attempt to protect them from an evil attacker. Then the father lost the 'magic bone' that he used to cast the spell and so the poor little girls are still waiting to be turned back into humans. Quite a few holes in this story, if you ask me, but nonetheless it adds charm to the local folklore.

We took the 900 steps down to the valley (known as the Giant Steps) and then indulged in an easy stroll to the scenic railway - the steepest funicular in the world, which we took to go back up again.  That was enough nature for one day, so we had a delicious boozy meal in a lovely restaurant (Echos) with breathtaking views of the valley.

I love that fact that Sydney has got so many weekend destinations around it - which is special because Australia is so vast that many places are so far from each other so depending on where you live you might have to drive many hours to reach something cool nearby. Sydney's proximity to the Blue Mountains, as well as the wine region of the Hunter, or the rolling hills of Kangaroo valley, make this city somewhat more special.

A chance in life

As my friends know very well a key event that shaped my life forever was winning a scholarship for the United World College of the Adriatic in 1997. I won one of the four scholarships that the Sardinian government had reserved for talented youngsters in the region.
Marta, Emauela, Elisa and myself were the lucky ones that year who made it after a few rounds of interviews.

I seem to remember that thousands and thousands of Italian students took part in the overall selection process, for about 20 actual places to study the International Baccalaureate in this boarding school. The number is probably exaggerated- for Italians often like to make things look more dramatic. What is not exaggerated is that a shed load of us fought to our very best to get a chance to escape our normality and our destiny and grab this opportunity. Attending this school meant opening the door to a world of opportunities that would never manifest themselves ever again.

The selection process was full on, and ranged from just academic tests all the way to group leadership challenges, role plays and interviews with psychologists and governmental representatives. Of those long days I remember a lunch at Valburger (a dodgy fast food place in Cagliari) with other candidates that seemed so much more self confident that I had ever been, meeting someone who would become one of my best friends, having five minutes to prepare for a role play were I was to argue that embargo was a justifiable way to drive policy when I did not know what embargo was, having to connect nine dots with three consecutive lines, being asked about Pythagoras' tetraktis, Marta in a leopard skin shirt,  meeting Gabriella (the most inspiring teacher I have ever had and that I wish would have 'forced' me to follow my real passion in life), being around a lot of people who seemed to be bright and determined, going to church and asking God to help me (something that I do not do often), and a feeling of massive fear and emptiness at the end of the process.

The final round was held at the school itself, near Triest. My dad and I took off on a trip filled of hope. I perfectly remember leaving home, my stomach filled with butterflies and nerves. My family could not quite  afford the air fare, so we drove to the North of Sardinia, took a 12 hours ferry to Genoa, and then drove all the way to Venice and Triest. Dad - bless his soul, told me that was not the last time I was gonna make him drive those roads.

He was right, as he often was.

If I had not made it, I would have not gone to university in London, I would have not traveled the world, I would not met the most important people of my life who have shared my journey with me , I would not be living in Sydney in the job I do and I would not be dreaming in English right now.

The moment that changed my life forever came on a June morning in country Sardinia. I had just spent two weeks waiting for a letter - waiting for the postman to turn up every day on his scooter and put me out of my misery.  The skies were so blue and the sun so hot. It felt like standing on the edge of a precipice without being able to move.  Every day without news was a day that pushed men further and further into fulfilling what my life was meant to be about rather than what I could dream of doing and being.

A telegram was delivered that day and my brother said it was for him. That moment, I understood that I had been rejected.My heart sunk. Ten second later I was crying. My brother had opened the telegram and realized that it was actually for me and that I had been accepted.  The telegram was written in English and said that they were pleased to inform me that I was one of the 20.

I will never forget that moment. How I felt, how life felt like it was opening up like a miracle had just happened. There a moments like those in everyone's life. It's the moment an Australian boy or girl jumps on a plane to kick off their oversea experience in Europe, it is the moment we discover a passion that will dominate our lives, it is the moment when what you did, said and thought resulted in changes that you could have never have imagined and that modified everything forever. Those are our key cross roads, and each of us has not got more than two or three in our lives. Those are the moments when real change happens and make all other changes possible.

My friends take the piss out of me because I talk about those days a lot. My friend Emma asked me whether I had gone there for 10 years, rather than  2, cause I seem to have an unfeasible amount of stories to tell about that place. However, the reason why I do is that I cannot help but feeling fortunate and thankful for that miracle to have happened. In many ways that was the beginning of my life.

Sydney after Hong Kong

Dawns over the Australian desert are made of fire, like a hellish landscape of incredible and distant beauty. Below, dark clouds like sponges soak up the last drops of  night. From outside,  the plane must look like an angel made of iron making its silent way somewhere important.
As I return to Australia after two weeks away it hits me again how remote and in many ways untouched this place is. It hits me how attached I am getting to it.

The last week in Hong Kong has been fabulous. Asia never fails to charm with its alien beauty, encompassing heat and engaging buzz. Hong Kong is the strange child of China, a world made of skyscrapers stolen from a jungle that still tries to prevail and that licks at the city with its disorderly green tongues. Eagles fly outside the window of my office on the 58th floor.  I wonder if life will take us here.  

The world is changing.

New York after Sydney

I am writing this entry from JFK on my way to Hong Kong after having spent a few days in New York for work. This was perhaps my fifth time in the Big Apple and certainly it has been very different from all my other visits.

All the other times were for pleasure, from London, when I was all about the Big Smoke and the big cities.

This time was a business trip with important meetings and the promise of fun in between.

Firstly, the trip from Sydney is much more epic than the pond cross from London. Door to door it takes about 25 hours, and the time difference is 14 hours. It's is a journey through space and time. Travelling with Qantas and American Airlines helped me feeling absolutely destroyed, defeated and awful by the time I touched down.

I spent the first three days managing a ghastly jetlag that I cannot even begin to describe. It was like being submerged in cold water and trying to make sense of the was going on above the surface. Or like being very hangover on repeat. 

Given that I had a few monumental meetings on the way just meant that the whole first half of the trip had its fair share of fear (TM) and anxiety. The low point was going to bed at 10pm one night, and then waking up two hours later and not being able to fall asleep again. Torture.
 
The other thing that I realised is that how used I have become to the sea breeze and the feeling of space that one gets in Sydney - New York suddenly felt dirty, fat, unhealthy and overwhelming. 

Having to work and try to impress all the big bosses when the only thing I wanted was sleeping and eating comfort food didn't help.

So, if you had asked me on Tuesday I would have told you that my trip was being painful. You would have probably thought also that I am a massive wingy wingey bang bang. I was.

However, as the jetlag subsided the 'switch' happened, in other words that magical spell that means that nobody can leave New York without having fallen in love with it. A lovely dinner at Buddhakan with Jx2Sx2, a fun night in Brooklyn, catching up with DJ, a run in the soft afternoon light in Central Park, an afternoon walk in Chelsea meant that I am leaving with wonderful memories of my time here. Again.

New York is one of those places with a massive personality and a lot of secrets to tell. I am a total outsider there, but the city makes you feel like you want to get to know it better.

In the past I always had that 'destiny feeling' that I would one day live there. It did not happen this time. I guess times move on and life stages take you in different place. I feel excited about being 'East' at the moment and quite excited about going back to that part of the world.

Autumnal Sun

Perhaps because La Ninha has made last summer wetter and cloudier than expected, the recent autumnal sun and crisp blue skies has felt like bliss. Walking down Liverpool Street in the soft morning light makes you feel like the world is slowing down, providing that moment of quiet and respite before another day at work. Sydney in Autumn is beautiful.

There is a feeling that the city is quieting down towards the hibernations of winter. People prefer dinners out with friends over bars after the big summer parties, and it all just feel cosier.
The gyms don't feel as frantic with people buffing up before a trip to North Bondi.
The line in front of Messina (the amazing gelato place on Victoria Road) persists somehow, but it is far from the crazy feeding frenzy of hot summer nights.

Sydney is definitely a place of seasons.

Pebbles

Sometimes it feels like we spend a great deal of our lives trying to balance all the ingredients & things that together will make us happy. Like pebbles on the shore. These do vary somewhat from person to person, but they are likely to include elements like: love, friendships & family, health&body, finances&work, self worth&development. It is an exhausting process and more often than not we find that at one particular point in time we feel like we have mastered some but not all of these elements.

The problem is that these things often work against each other. For instance if we are out there having a great time travelling the world with our mates, we might find that we feel out of shape and broke. Or, if work is going great, we might find that we are not putting a lot of effort in our relationships or we do not have time to cultivate our passions.

This is a bit of a pickle, and might just lead us to keep doing this 'balancing act' throughout our lives, as though there was some sort of mathematical formula of happiness that we are trying to uncover and exploit for the rest of our lives.

In turn this might make us feel that ' we are not quite there yet'.

To make things more complex, the standards that we use to assess success for each of the 'pebbles that make up happiness' changes over time. For instance, what we regard as successful at work, or the value we place or money becomes more demanding as we grow older. If when we started working out the El Dorado was being able to run 5km, by the time we run 5km we feel that we need to run a marathon.

Growing, developing and becoming better people is obviously something positive - however it does make it very hard to ever feel we have fully arrived.

Despite all this there are moments in life where we do feel truly happy and content with what's going on. It might be a great night out with our best friends, or the day of our wedding, or the day we finally achieved that long wanted promotion, etc etc. If we think about it, these are not moments where 'we have it all', where we have achieved that elusive balance of pebbles. More likely, these moments of happiness are just instants where we simply do not wish anything more than we already have.

Expectations play a massive role in the way we perceive happiness. And since we tend to be quite bad at predicting what will make us happy then it is key that we proactively manage our expectations in such a way that we do not set up ourselves objectives that might end up failing to bring us that happiness we had expected them to bring us. For instance, at work we might set up ourselves an objective to become a Managing Director because we believe that we will feel happy from a career perspective once we get there. However, after sweating over it for years and finally getting there we might discover that being an MD did not do anything to make us happier and that we should have focussed more on other things in our lives. We should never second guess happiness.

That is why it is worth spending time understanding what is the baseline of our own happiness, the rough ingredients that bring us happiness. I think that this baseline is less changeable over time, and in many ways it is easier to determine that the end point where we guess we should get to. For instance, whilst the definition of a top holiday will become more demanding over the years, the fact that we love spending time with our best mates has not really changed since we were broke students.

The other thing that I think is important is what I call 'the ten years time test' i.e. asking ourselves how we will feel about something in ten years time. It is fair to say that things like the missed promotion will not seem so important after all, whilst the fact that we did not cultivate our passion for painting is more likely to stick around as a regret. The ten years time test is a great way to determine the baseline of our own happiness.

In practical terms our baseline will include things like determining what is the minimum amount of money that we require to do the things we love, and then accepting that anything above that will please us, but it will not make us happier people (this might be liberating and make us realise that we can change job/career and still be happy).

Happiness then is not about constantly trying to balance a pile of pebbles, it is more like stripping down the expectations that we have imposed on ourselves and live life in such a way that our older self will look back with no regrets.