So cute you wish you had two, one for home and another to take with you traveling
Once, not a long time ago, after building a wood oven in our backyard, we had the parents of a friend of ours over to make pizza. The mother, whom we’d just met and knew very little about us, nonetheless seemed quite taken with me, especially, and at one point turned to me and said, You’re quite the renaissance man. I won’t lie, my ego immediately started to swell when in the very next beat Franca replied: You know, Steve hasn’t always been Steve.
And she’s right. I haven’t always been Steve, not this version of Steve anyway. More on that in a sec.
A second quick story: Friends of ours had a daughter, who used to refer to our family as The Francas, not The Gilberts, which whatever, she was just a kid and kids sometimes make those kind of mistakes. But, in the words of Walt Whitman, “Whatever satisfies the soul is truth.” And so yes, absolutely, I’m lucky and grateful to be part of the family Franca.
Stepping back even further, mid-2005: Franca comes to me one afternoon and relates a few details regarding the writing life of Gabriel García Márquez of which starts a conversation between us which ends a year and a half later with me quitting my (then) career in supply chain to stay home and write a novel (which I did. Eventually. In good time).
For her book club she was reading One Hundred Years of Solitude (limited series adaptation coming soon on Netflix!) and because the book had been her selection she was doing some research on the author’s backstory. Which included this little abridged tidbit: In the days while García Márquez was studying law and working as a journalist, he and his wife, Mercedes, were taking a short vacation to the beaches of Acapulco when he pulled the car to the side of the road and said to her, I have a book I need to write, to which his beloved wife responded: Then write it. And so they turned the car around, returned home, sold much of their belongings to support themselves, and he secluded himself in a closet for the better part of a year to write.
Telling this is not to serve as a comparison of my work to that of García Márquez, I might wish it, but no, not even close. But it did lead to a similar pivotal moment in time when my life, like his, and my family’s life, like Mercedes's, met the necessary requirement to embrace change: Permission.
And following on the heels of permission comes surrender.
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Gabriel was not always Gabriel
For Mercedes to be okay with changing direction (literally) in order to follow a path that seemed so rife with the possibility of monumental mistake, she had to believe in her husband. She had to have seen in him the García Márquez he could become. He acknowledges this in many of the dedications written in his books: To Mercedes, of course.
To feel that strongly about another person, to believe in them with such ferocity, requires first that the person in question believe in themselves. García Márquez had to believe in his potential and then give himself permission to become the person he could be. What came next was easier: Just give up whatever other plans had been laid and surrender to the longing.
Back briefly to that “life-changing” moment I experienced 20 years ago. Since then, I have worked as a teacher, a nonprofit board member, start up entrepreneur, an advocate for social change, a small business owner and baker, a tour operator, and back to writer.
Franca’s list is just as long, adding: veteran, accountant, working mom, volunteer. Together we’ve been athletes, collaborators, donkey wranglers, travelers, builders, award-winners, friends, lovers, partners in crime, VIPs, risk takers, mistake makers, storytellers, and, for the most part, measurers of what matters most (to us, anyway).
There have been so many Steves and Francas. Flourishing, alone and together, in a variety of roles. Which is the point in sharing all this: It’s not so much what or who you decide to change about yourself—you will become many versions of that person—but that you take the step forward in the first place. Accept that longing—whether or not you have a Mercedes or a Franca to validate it—and give yourself permission to surrender all else and pursue it.
Nothing Special
All that’s to say, we’re not special. We really aren’t. People do this all the time. You have done this yourself, I’m certain. Many times, I would bet. But as we get older we find it harder and harder to recall the capacity we had as young people to follow our hearts, to change, to enter into what the author Oliver Burkeman of Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals calls “a truly authentic relationship with life”.
It's easy to see why. To triumph despite the predicaments of life, Dante had to pass through the gates of Hell. Goethe’s Faust agreed to the Devil’s condition to never be satisfied with what he has. Unfortunately, for the rest of us there is no shady dealmaker or comedic hero to guide us through the puzzling, unpredictable, and sometimes outright elusive labyrinth our shining, modern world presents. We have only our wits and whatever conclusions we can draw from our missteps, wrong turns and fuck ups to guide us.
Like you, we are no strangers to making mistakes. We have lifted ourselves and one another countless times from the ruins of blunder and misfortune. From the anguish of war and the quaking accord of the sizzling rapport that followed to building careers and then leaving or losing them. Many of these occasions have appeared in this newsletter in a way I hope serves as an inspiring and candid chronicle of the trials, errors and revelations that eventually led us, two middle-aged, unfinished, aspiring adults, to move halfway around the world, a potential pinnacle of life-altering mistakes.
To be sure, it has not been easy. We struggle often with how to navigate this new world we’ve thrust upon ourselves, and at the same time dealing with the existential struggles of the old one: worry for our children, feelings of abandonment, the colossal change of what the Jungian psychoanalyst James Hollis describes as overwhelmment: the essential powerlessness in the face of our environment.
“There is another world and it is this one”
—Paul Eluard
Fortunately, all these many Steves and Francas (I prefer The Steve and Francas for reasons I’ve mentioned above) didn’t require us to change worlds. But to live fully in the world to which we see ourselves belonging, one eye open on the steps we might take (i.e. leaving a job, taking a vacation, or not) to achieve those things for which we most long.
There’s really no secret sauce to it. I have not always been Steve, no more than any of you have always been you. Give credit where credit is due—in my case: To Franca, of course—and become the whoever the You is that's waiting.
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