Hi There,
In May 2022, my wife, Franca, and I closed our little sourdough bakery set in rural eastern North Carolina and sold our house, our belongings and car, and after saying goodbye to our three adult children and other members of our family, left for Sicily, Italy.
It was a difficult time to start, full of worry, uncertainty and angst over what might come next for us, two middle-aged, unfinished, aspiring adults brave or stupid enough to move halfway around the world. The struggles we encountered in navigating this new world we had thrust upon ourselves, paled in comparison to the existential struggles of the one we'd left behind. Worry over our children. Fighting back feelings of abandonment, overcoming the colossal change of what the Jungian psychoanalyst James Hollis describes as overwhelmment: the essential powerlessness in the face of our environment.
Heavy stuff, I know. Being partially retired—in addition to powerless—you find an inordinate amount of time on your hands to ponder.
At the center of the reasons for our moving here lies the same search for longing, purpose and place universal to every human being (and central to this newsletter). It was also a homecoming of sorts—Franca’s father was born in Sicily—and reckoning with the midlife awareness of finitude, the acceptance of which allows everyone, at least in theory, to enter into what is hopefully an extremely authentic attitude about what it means to be alive.
That said, setting aside, briefly, the huge do-over moving to Sicily has offered us in terms of how we eat, what we do with our time, on what and how we spend money, the question still looms of what will happen if and when we learn that it’s not everything we’d imagined? When the luster of paradise fades.
All I can say to that is we'll see. Stick around and you will too.
To learn more about our move to Sicily, I've collected a few essays from The Revelate. If you stumble across any questions, or just pop up out of thin air, feel free to drop me a note. I have plenty of time and will answer, promise.
Let's start here: How Quitting a Job 15 Years Ago Made Moving to Sicily Possible
What follows are three essays in which I attempted to sum up in three easy parts on why we moved to Sicily. It was not as easy as I thought, but they offer and nice peak into our thought process at a point early in our move here.
- Part One: Crunching Numbers to find the Right Words
- Part Two: Why Troina
- Part Three: Here, Because Why Not
And finally, here are a couple of my favorite essays I've written on the topic of becoming an expat. Enjoy!
