my thoughts while jogging

At the beginning of my jog I ran past a man playing the Beatles, a great way to start any run.

As I was jogging today on the fortezza I was looking at the different people I was jogging past and just became overwhelmed with how much I love Italy. And this is one of the reasons: the people out there and everywhere in town are people of all ages and abilities. There are plenty of elderly people as well as mentally/physically handicapped people everywhere. They live their lives just as everyone else lives their lives and we all live our lives side by side.

I will admit, at first I wasn’t a huge fan of this. I didn’t like walking across the town and often running into the same crazy old man who always gets way too close to my face as he says, “in piedi?” “in piedi?” and pretends he is a ballerina. I was initially even more concerned when I found that same man working a normal job, alone, as the front desk person at the public library. It’s really pretty common here to be approached by someone who is actually crazy. And I first, I wondered a lot why this happens so much more often here. Are there more crazy people in Siena than the rest of the world? Probably not. And then I figured it out, its because this culture isn’t trying to hide these people. That man who always approaches me pretending to be a ballerina is strange, but he is harmless, and this society knows that. From what I’ve seen, people don’t react to this difference with disgust or fear, they just act normally, because it is just another person living life a different way.

And on top of that, I like that everyone is given the same chance for normal jobs and a normal life. My favorite place to go in town is a medieval garden and restaurant run by ex-convicts and mentally disabled people. I think its really wonderful that a society can realize who is dangerous and who is not and not base it entirely off of a label a person has been given.

I like that the elderly people are an integral part of society. They walk everywhere. They run businesses. They carry all of their groceries up seven flights of stairs. Nobody is telling them that they should sit in a house and have everything done for them. It doesn’t need to be. They are perfectly capable of living the lives they’ve been living (up to a certain point, I know) and it’s great that they are doing that. And I’m sure it’s much more healthy too.

This got me thinking about how so much of real life is not pushed under the rug here and hidden. It’s all there, all out in the open. Which put my mind on a tangent about how apartments here are generally kept colder in the winter than American houses and generally hotter in the summer. And how here, I don’t go from a heated house to a heated car to a heated building. Here everyone walks everywhere. When it is cold, I need to be dressed warmly. When it rains, I need to be wearing waterproof shoes. I feel so much more like I am really on this earth and really experiencing life when I am here. We eat the foods that are in season. If avocados are not in season, you’re not going to find them anywhere and you’re not going to eat them. It’s that simple. There is no weird bubble I’m living in that protects me from seeing/experiencing the world as it is and I love that.

unrelated to the post: but a happy photo of a friend and me in the country