This has been a very strange summer for the north of Italy: rainy most of the times and with particularly low temperatures. Not the best one for the mood, but a very good one for a very pregnant woman and for fruit and vegetables. This is the little harvest my daughter and husband brought home on the 15th of August, bank holiday in Italy and usually one of the hottest days of the year. I love the colors and I want to remember it...
It's been a couple of really intense days! It all started Sunday night when I broke my waters and I had not even realized it. After all in the previous delivery it had not happened and it was all new to me. We freaked out, just a little bit, because you're never prepared enough, and even if the hospital bag was ready since the month before, we began to spin like crazy particles all around the house to collect the last things.
The contractions began two hours later, on the way to the hospital, and they have intensified only after admission. I chose to carry on labor in the same bed as last time, hoping that I would bring us luck. I was not entirely quiet because I had my 6 years old daughter with us and the all grandparents were far away, but things resolved for the better since the hospital staff let her sleep on a stretcher (nice Italian flexibility!) where she spent the whole night safe, but with her eyes open wide for the too many emotions.
Things were so different from my previous delivery. Contractions were becoming more and more intense very quickly and it was clear that it was a matter of hours. I asked for an epidural that I got half an hour later. It was pure bliss. Everybody should be informed about it. Epidural is pure bliss and lets you go through the labour without pain so that you can keep all your energy for the final phase of the delivery. So, at 5 am I started pushing (here is that the pain became intense) and Vittoria was born at 5.15.
The nurses placed her on my chest and they let me keep her during the final operations. She was quiet, in contact with my skin. After half an hour I came out of the delivery room walking on my legs and pushing the cradle and I showed the newcomer to his sister, who could not speak with emotion. We spent one hour all together, our new family of four in a small room where I could already breast feed the baby to the breast and have a chat with my eldest.
The emotions are very strong. During the pregnancy, I had almost never thought that I would have had that little bundle in my hands. I was to scared from the delivery and the many worries for the baby to think about it. And I did not even understand what a thrill it would be for the father and older sister who are obviously crazy. And now a new story can begin...
1) I almost finished the embroidered hospital bag It's not time to show it yet, but I am quite proud of it, especially because my daughter loves it so much.
2) I colored my sketch Sketching is a passion I have since a couple of years, and I am so sorry that I have had almost no time to practice in the last months. So now I would like to catch up but I find difficult to start. I had a quick one in the weekend and I finished it today just with a very little touch of color. Sketching should be part of my daily routine!
3) Quality time with my daughter: Star Wars! I know it may sound incredible but I have never seen any episode of Star Wars. I have tried, I can tell you, but it's not my kind of movie. Of course I know it's a masterwork and everybody should see it and this is why I have been talking about it to my daughter in the past few weeks. And finally, she asked me to watch it together. We saw half of it (as we always do) yesterday night in bed and we are going to see the rest tonight. And the nice thing is that I am liking it!
Third day of my project. I feel like I am losing the rhythm a little bit, but I have to consider that I am nine months pregnant, and so I get tired whatever I do and I have to take a nap in the afternoon. So:
1) I made super healthy popsicle with Sofia Which makes me very happy because it goes in the direction of doing something fun with my daughter and of eating very healthy. It is so easy that I think I will go on doing them until the weather stays good. I just mixed half yogurt, half apricot juice and a couple of spoons of sugar. Then we sliced a banana and put the small pieces in the mix. We poured everything in the IKEA stamps for the popsicles and voilà.
2) I began to prepare a bag for the newborn dresses I know this may sound quite boring, but I am very close to my due date, so I will bother you with some stuff regarding newborn and things to do. So, I remembered that for my first daughter the hospital required a bag for the dresses with a name stamped on it. My mother sewed and embroidered a beautiful one for her. Of course I could have simply bought one for my second daughter, but then i thought about all the people telling me that the second child gets less attention compared to the first and I felt guilty. So yesterday I made the project, bought the material and started building the bag
3) Finally, I went on reading my weekly book I planned to read one book per week, and this book has to be related to my other plans. I can read whatever I want of course, but it should go on top of my weekly book. My choice for this week is "The power of habit" by Charles Duhigg
I think the moment has arrived to talk about the content of my project. As I said, I have a year (or almost a year) in front of me because of my maternity leave, and I thought that I needed to plan it well to avoid loosing any time. The idea first occurred to me when I realized that I can barely remember what I did in my last (and only) maternity leave, and this time I want to do something different: I want to use all the time I will have to become happier, changing some habits and adding (and removing) something from my life.
So I decided that my year had to become a project. This means that I have a goal and a set of topics I want to focus on. Clearly defining the content of a yearly project is not an easy task, but I think this mind map summarizes my project quite well.
The most important thing was defining the key areas to work on. I chose: Work, Home, Kids, Personal, Other (which includes what for me can be considered fun). Of course, tons of topics necessarily remained outside the map, but I think it's obvious that I cannot cover everything. I tried to focus on simple things that I want to improve and that I believe will make me happier at the end of the day. On many of these topics, I already started a journey and they were therefore automatically included. Some of them are goals that I have never been able to include completely and were included because "i's now or never"...
One of the topic, the Personal one, is very much related to self improvement. I decided to focus on three key points: Focus and perseverance, Going minimal, and relationships. And while preparing the mind map, I realized that these three personal improvement areas are deeply linked to many other topics I included in the project (see the arrows).
I think work, kids and home are pretty obvious areas where I really want to improve, and I included in Other the main things that make me feel well in this period. I think this area can change in time, but since one of my key topic of self improvement is the capability to keep the focus, I decided to write them down too, in order not to change them too often.
I have had many versions of this sheet, but I decided to freeze it because, as a very good procrastinator, I could have go on changing it forever and never started to do anything.
So, now that my satellite mind map is clear, I can proceed working towards my goal. I decided that I won't have a very structured approach, at least for the first period, especially because I have to give birth in 15 days and I know that all my resolutions could break in a minute. I went instead for a lighter approach: I decided that I have to do at least 3 things every day that go in the right direction, that help me fulfill one of the goals in the chart. I'll start with this and publish my three things every day.
As I said in my previous post, my main goal for my maternity leave is to use my time in the best way. Time, in fact, is what I missed more in the past few years and I will not waste this opportunity. The first question that would occur to anyone is: "Use your time in the best way to do what?". This time, however, I decided to start from another point of view instead of diving immediately in the content. And so I tried to answer to three simple questions:
What is my goal?
What makes sense to add to an annual project?
What is the best method to carry out an annual project?
In my previous attempts, I have always started from the second point, creating a long to do list and small projects to fulfill, without even knowing why. Inevitably, after a lot of effort to stay focused in carrying out the goals, I found myself facing the same questions: "Why am I doing this?".
What is my goal?: I am a person who lives by good intentions and trying to pursue them. I've always been thinking that my ultimate goal was my self improvement, until this ultimate goal was no longer enough for me. I began to wonder why should I continue to live to improve myself. When will I finally decide to be what I am and to stop trying to change myself?
Then, by chance, I came across the book "The Happiness Project" by Gretchen Rubin, or maybe it wasn't a chance and I just thought it might be an interesting starting point given that I find have a year to plan ahead to me.
I found some interesting ideas, but one struck me most of all and helped me to come out from my long-standing issue related to why I am choosing to change. Gretchen Rubin' book is about a project the author decides to complete in a year with the goal of being happier than she was in the beginning. Nothing more that that. And an essential component of this happiness is what she calls growth, and I call self improvement.
Everything is clearer now: the ultimate goal of my project is to be happier. This path passes through a range of activities that do not give immediate happiness, but lead to personal growth that is an essential component of happiness.
I can live with this and embark full speed in a new project!
What makes sense to enter into an annual project? And then, like magic, everything is clear. I do not have big doubts about what should be part of my project. Don't get me wrong, it was a hard choice, but the criteria were quite simple: I chose a series of activities related to different areas of my life where I believe I need to improve not with the aim of improving, but to be happier and to make those around me happier. I will dive into this topic in my next posts.
What is the best method to carry out an annual project? The answer is: "I do not know!" I made countless attempts to carry out a voluntary project (nobody asked me to do it) and I succeeded rarely. But I kept trying, and I found a lot of methods that helped me a lot in the past and that I want to share here in a structured way. I'll talk about this too in a future post.
This is my first day of maternity leave at home, after some days of holidays. It feels strange to stay at home all day, even if it's the 4th of August and so most of my colleagues and friends are on holiday anyway.
I will keep a diary of these months because I don't want to loose any moment of it an I think that writing down a few sentences every night, will help me to stay on track with my plans and activities.
Today I still had to tidy up after the holidays so I don't consider it as a normal day, but I was able any way to attack one of the longest waiting points in my to do list:
Back up and sort the photos on my pc.
I'm not over yet, but I am happy I was able to use my day one too!
This weekend I spent three days in Venice. For me it was the first time after twenty years, if we don't take into consideration one or two work dinners in the meantime. I had only been there once when I was fourteen for a summer camp. I remember it was crowded and hot and the smell of the sea was so strong to be disturbing.
This time the view was completely different, cold and foggy, and the laguna looked sleepy and dreamy.
What are the ingredients for the perfect weekend? A good recipe might be: a group of people diverse in every sense, united by a passion for art and creativity that meets in a place full of suggestions to experiment with new techniques and know each other better.
Alba and Antonietta, our hosts opened the doors of this wonderful art studio, that, until recently, was the laboratory of an artist and philosopher, Giancarlo Scapin.
Christine Schmidt of the "Yellow owl workshop" has a personal theory about the borders among craft, art and design: "Craft is the skill and tecnique used to create an object: the "how" something is made by hand with a specific medium. Design and art both use craft. Art and design are not separated but by an aim. Design conveys information. Art conveys emotion. Design's goal is functionality: to serve a purpose such as informing or performing a task. It is all about utility. Art has its own function: art's goal is to encourage contemplation."
In this case, the beauty of the shapes and colors, the life and the movement contained in each piece, the emotion they provoked left no space for any doubt: it was art we were experiencing. It was evident in every single corner of the studio.
But as Schmidt says, art uses craft to reach its goal and and I think that sometimes beauty is clearly visible also in the process of creation of art.
I can not help but think that the way to achieve an art work is sometimes fascinating and worthy of note itself, especially if it is an entirely manual process, done with ancient instruments that carry a story with them. And when the art involves a very physical medium like ceramics, this is even more true according to me.
The studio is housed in an old woollen mill, beautifully restored.
We could not have found a more suitable and inspiring context to free our creativity and follow together the traces of an ancient technique like making paper.
Needless to say, in a context that is so full of inspiration, even a meeting of new friends, a picnic lunch, or the afternoon coffee ritual is full of atmosphere, especially if the cups, glasses and plates, are glazed ceramic masterpieces realized by the master Scapin.
In this case, our goal was not of course to create works of art or to push anyone to meditation, but to focus on the "process of making" itself.
I think we all wanted to reach the roots of our passion for the art of origami, that brought us together.
And all the fun and the enthusiasm we found in slowly seeing our results coming out showed us that passion and creativity can definitely bring people together.
And when you breathe art, you just want to breathe some more. And Italy is the right place for that! A walk in the streets of Vicenza was the perfect conclusion for an artsy weekend
The city of Palladio has many hidden treasures and and the rain was not enough to curb our enthusiasm.
This is a beautiful country and I like to remember that, especially in times like these, when the things outside sometimes make us forget about it.