"Vivere e' cominciare" (To live is to begin) said Cesare Pavese.
Now, I am no match with Pavese but I still would like to put my 2 cents in this. I would say that not only to live is to begin but also to learn.
So, if Cesare and I would ever write a book together ;-) it would go something like this "To live is to begin and to live is to learn new things".
Some people say life is a journey. I say life is a trip. A journey is too long for me, I want it to be little trips, like 2-3 miles long, no more than that. So that you have enough time to go visit many more places, rather than just one.
In light of this life policy that I hold, I usually spend my extra time, as a hobby, trying to learn something new. It might be an activity, a sport (rarely a sport), a new expression in english (I love those). Yesterday, just to give you an example, I heard the expression "pity party" for the first time. I thought it was absolutely brilliant. Both words start with the same letter, they kind of rhyme and they make perfect sense. In a short, concise and precise way, "pity party" does not fail to give you an exact picture.
For those of you who, like me, had never heard this before, the expression refers to those situations where you have a problem, you know you have a problem, but rather than fixing it, you'd rather complain about it and pity yourself over it. Isn't it marvelous?
The other day I heard "one upper" for the first time too. This one also is a masterpiece in my opinion. A "one-upper" is a person who likes to show off and is always one step ahead of you. Beautiful. :-)
New idioms are not all I learn though. I am constantly looking for opportunities to learn and when they don't come naturally, which most of the time they do if you are attentive and careful enough, I go look for them.
A few months ago I went and bought a guitar. Did I know how to play it? No. I have been a piano aficionado for a while now but the guitar... never. At the time, it had been a few weeks since I had learned anything new, so I decided to buy it. Last week I took my first lesson from a friend. Now I have a whole new world to walk into, the world of strings, chords and comfortable, easy music. All that, for 200$.
Another thing I love to do is to watch, to observe other people's behaviors and attitudes. I adore this. I look at the way they react to things, good or bad, happy or sad. I look at their body language, what they're really trying to say after you remove all the social rules and the political correctness. I try to look into their eyes and straight into their hearts. Then I learn from them. Sometimes I learn that I should never act like them, some other times I learn I should be more like them. But still, I learn something.
If you take life as daily, small grocery store trips, where you discover something new and then you move on... I guess you'll never run the risk of getting bored. I dread this, my biggest fear in life is getting bored. Therefore, I try to turn everything (or most things) into something exciting. I must admit though, there are a few things, just a few, like baseball and numbers, that I just can't seem to find exciting, no matter what. ;-)
That's all folks. Kisses to all.
Sonia
