How To Never See Anything The Same Again: Part 2

Stockholm. Now I never wanna go home. All right, well, there's that song again. The song about Stockholm. If you were with us for part one of this series, you know that we are traveling on becoming you these days. For a three part series, we are traveling far and wide so that we can see ourselves better up close. Now, that is like woo woo and abstract. I mean, what the heck am I talking about? You know, I'm not a woo woo girl. Hello, everyone. This is Susie Welch. I'm a professor at NYU Stern School of Business, and this is the Becoming youg podcast. So very quickly, because some of you might be with us for the very first time, and if you are, yay, welcome to the Becoming youg pod. I'm really, really happy you're here. If you're back with us again, I thank you very, very much. But anyway, I still have to explain what becoming you is. I will so very quickly. Becoming you is a methodology that excavates three big data sets. Your values and your aptitudes. And the third one is your economically viable interest. And it does that. It excavates that data, which is all in you, so that you can identify what lies at the intersection of all of that data. What kind of career or job or life. Now, on this show, we definitely talk about understanding your aptitudes, and we definitely talk about understanding your interests. And they are critical, critically important. But the big, hard data set that we often find ourselves in and that we naturally struggle with is values. They are hard to know, and sometimes they're really hard to admit. And sometimes they're really, really, really hard to live. Now, a few years ago, the Becoming youg Labs developed a test called the Values Bridge. Probably many people listening to this have taken the Values Bridge. Anyone can take it online. And it actually evaluates your values and it rank orders them from 1 to 16, and it tells you where you have conflicts and harmonies and so forth. Almost 150,000 people have taken it. And you can take it. But this is a huge but. Okay, but understanding our values is not over with a test. Our whole life is an exercise in understanding two things. How we came to our values and how much we're actually living them. I mean, in a way, just discovering what your values are, that's the beginning. All right? And sometimes discovering that stuff about our values happens very powerfully when we get outside of ourselves and we rewire our brains with travel. I'm sorry, I have to do it again. I have to quote Marcel Proust on this actual topic, because it's so apt. It's like he's been listening to this podcast. All right, back in, I don't know, 1900, he said, the real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes. So last week, I talked about what happened to my understanding of love during a trip to the Taj Mahal with my late husband Jack. And it was a super big eureka about why belovedness, as we call the value of romantic love, was lower for me than for him and what that meant for my search for myself and for my purpose. So if you haven't heard that and you're interested in the value of belovedness, go check it out. It was last week's podcast, but this week we are traveling again. Where to? You ask Susie. Where are we going? Well, here's a hint. Yes, we're going to Italy. Or to be more specific, Sicily. Everyone's excited about Sicily these days. Everyone's going there for their honeymoon and for vacation. Why? Probably because of the White Lotus, which was a very tawdry but very smart HBO show. I watched every minute of it. But I have been interested in Sicily my whole life because that's where my mother's side of my family is from. And that island loomed large, very, very large in the stories of my upbringing. And it was a beautiful paradise that was the crossroads of the world. It was better than all of Europe combined. It had the best food, it had the greatest writers. And these stories about Sicily, this paradise, Sicily made me proud to be Sicilian, but I was not sure what that meant because Sicily has a reputation, right? It has a reputation for the Mafia and for violence and for very tribal behaviors. You know, are you surprised that the top two phrases in my house when I grew up were, blood is thicker than water. Charity begins at home. Very Sicilian in their vibe. And when those were said to me when I was growing up, they were both attributed to the Bible, but of course, neither actually appears in the Bible. And in fact, they are quite unbiblical. But, you know, I never got to go to Sicily over the course of my life. I had been very lucky to go to Italy many times. I went to Florence in college when I was studying art, and I went a lot of times after that. Jack's best friend, Paolo Fresco, lived there, so we would go over to visit him all the time. And, you know, we were in Rome so often in one period of my life that I had a. You know, I had a hairdresser there who, like, remembered me. It was that kind of thing. I mean, I've been to Italy a lot. But in 2018, I had one of those moments when you think, you know what? The clock is not ticking backward. And I decided I finally needed to go to Sicily in my homeland. And I needed to see Calta Neceta, my family's village, and Palermo, which also occasionally appeared in the family lore and frankly, everywhere else. And eat as much pasta as possible. Pasta played large in this. And so I set about planning a trip for me and Jack and my siblings and their spouses to go to Sicily. Except a month before we were all supposed to leave, Jack's health took a turn for the worse. This was two years before he died, and he had to stay back home. But he was wonderful, and he didn't want me to cancel the trip, and he insisted I bring Sophia, my daughter, instead. And she was 28 then. And so off we went to Sicily in the spring for a week. And this was a meticulously planned trip. Cause I'm that girl. But also, we really want to see everything. And we really wanted to get a grip on this island, which had clearly had a grip on my grandmother, Francesca, who had played a huge role in our upbringing. I mean, she lived with us on and off. But here's the thing about her. She didn't talk about Sicily a lot. She described the island, but she did not talk about it. She kind of whispered mysteriously about it. She. She didn't talk about Sicily, like, normally. Like, our family was here. We lived there. Our family did this. We. You know, there was no sort of clarity around what they were doing in s. There was, though, and this is super important to the story. There was this whispered narrative that I was raised with. Whispered narrative. And it was that our family while in Sicily was actually very special. They were different. They were kind of noble. They were patrician. All the women were beautiful, and the men were very elegant, and they were educated. They were important. There was this character that was whispered about called the Judge, and there was another character who was whispered about called the Egyptian. And there were beautiful clothes in these whispered stories, and there was money of mysterious origin. And there were parties, and there was a supporting cast that involved, like, opera singers and princesses. And they weren't like the other paisan who came over. Okay? No way. The Tubiolos. That was the family name. The Tubiolos. They were special. This was the narrative, the whispered narrative. But. But, I mean, I'm going to be real with you. By the time I was 10, I thought to myself, this cannot be true. This. I mean, really. I was young. I was thinking, this cannot be true. It just didn't add up. On my mother's side of the family, all the men were laborers when they came to the United States. And they were. I mean, they were rough, for lack of a better word. They were not educated. And actually, to tell you the truth, as a little girl, I experienced them as brutes and bullies. They were big and they yelled a lot. And the women, they were better. But we're not talking about people who were accustomed to anything but doing their own laundry by hand. So when I was in high school, mystified by my family's background but not really probing it, I was sent away to boarding school. And for the first time, I encountered real, live rich people. And I saw what rich people looked and acted like, and that sealed the deal. I knew my family was not rich. And in fact, from what I could piece together, they were probably pretty poor. And this did not bother me at all. It was just the truth. They were typical Italian immigrants who came to America to find a better life. I had no idea what was up with the whispering. I didn't get it. I had nothing but comfort with the fact that we were paison. Even if my family and my grandmother and my mother really didn't seem to. Now, I might add, this is important, that my Sicilian side had a great deal of drama going on. Huge drama. My grandmother Francesca married her husband very young, 18 or 19, had four children. Very quickly divorced him, picked up her children, got on a train, went to La Jolla, California, and very murky circumstances. He comes out and finds her. She marries him again. Two years later, divorces him again. Can you imagine a Sicilian Catholic immigrant woman under the age of 40, married and divorced her own husband with four young children twice. Okay? And there was just. This is a massive amount of drama. And there was drama all over. There were alliances and there were grudge matches. And it was, you know, in a way, I thought, okay, we're just like every family. Later, when I went to boarding school, I realized not every family had every single meal be a screaming match. And there was not this much drama and mystery in every family. But it was sort of like, okay, we were Sicilian. It kind of felt like it went with the territory. Now, I want to say one really important thing is that if you try to have anybody explain to you the drama, God protect you. If you ask, like, why did Nana divorce this guy twice? You just absolutely could not ask these questions. Very hush, hush. I do know that my grandmother kept everything afloat because she was an incredibly skilled knitter and she made these beautiful silk ribbon dresses and she sold them in a store in Rochester. And she ended up on her own devices. A single mother, divorced in the 30s and 40s, raising four children, sending them all to college on her own dime and building a business. And I actually, to this day, the most precious things I own are these four beautiful silk ribbon dresses that my grandmother made. They're too small for me to wear, but I am going to hold on to them. But here's the thing that's sad about her. She was super bitter. She lived with us and she was bitter and she was mad and she fought with my mother my entire life long and they fought with each other in Italian, so we never knew what it was about. So this was just basically the background noise to my childhood and how Sicily played into it. Kind of angry grandmother, bullyish man, drama over there, drama over here, and no clear explanation about it. Okay, so let's get to the trip. It was fabulous. We had such a blast. We climbed Mount Etna and we went to a beautiful vineyard at the foot of it and had just incredible meal there. I mean, some of the most, my most favorite pictures of my life are my sisters and I standing on the top of Mount Etna. And we saw this beautiful, this insanely beautiful baroque village called Noto. And there's Greek rooms, runes in Sicily that are second to none. They're like from 5th century BC. They're just beautiful. I mean, Sicily does have everything. It has art and, and many, many cultures. And every night we ate copious amounts of pasta because we're vegan. So this is vegan paradise. And we drank this thing called artichoke grappa. If you've never had grappa, Grappa is a alcoholic beverage that cleans out your veins like Drano. I mean, it is just this insane. It's an after dinner drink. I mean, if you've had limoncello, you know, put that on steroids and fill it with gasoline and you've got grappa and then there's this artichoke. Okay, I could have a whole show about artichoke rapa. Anyway, that was a diversion. Towards the end of the week, we finally made our way to Calta Niceta, which is located in the dead center of Sicily, not on this beautiful shoreline. And that is where I discovered how little I knew about my family. I was, by the way, 58 years old. Now, Caldeniseta is not just a random Sicilian village. It has a very long history because it was settled in 1085 and over the centuries it was home to noblemen and an opera house. But Importantly, in the 1600s, it was discovered to be sitting on vast sulfur mines. Sulfur reserves. And why does that matter? Well, because in those days, sulfur was one of the three key ingredients in gunpowder. And thusly, Calton Aceda became the heart, the absolute center of the global military industrial complex. You couldn't shoot a gun without a product from Calton Assetta. And right after that, it was also discovered that sulfur makes an excellent additive to fertilizer and it makes everything grow faster. So by the 19th century, putting it together, Calton de Ceda was arming and feeding the entire world. And therefore lots of rich people lived there. The owners of the sulfur mines, I mean, they were million trillionaires and the distributors of the sulfur itself, they lived there. And that's why you can see in Calta Neceta wide boulevards and like mind blowing churches and huge houses on these gorgeous palazzos. And it kind of looks like, you know, this extraordinary place for rich people. But obviously there were also laborers there. Now, I did not even know that sulfur was mined until we arrived in Caltennesseda and we had our tour. And that is where I found out that life working in the sulfur mines, especially around Caltennesseta, was among the harshest, harshest industrial experiences in all of modern Europe. Look, this is the way it goes. Sulfur was extracted very deep underground and it was extracted in these hot airless shafts lit only by oil lamps. And the miners used hand tools to cut sulfur bearing rock. And then they loaded it into baskets. And the temperatures were usually above 104 degrees and oxygen was very scarce and toxic fumes filled everything. And here's the thing, cave ins and explosions were constant risks. They happened all the time. But perhaps the most haunting feature of the mines was the use of carousi. These are boys as young as seven or eight and they were the ones who worked the mines, little boys, they had to use kids because the adult men died so young. And These children carried 65 pound loads of sulfur up steep narrow tunnels dozens of times a day. Little seven, eight year old boys. And many were bound by debt contracts with the mine owners. And their families could never repay these debts. And there was deformities and stunted growth and early death. This happened all the time. And these little boys worked and the wages were nothing if they got them. They were meager and they were irregular. And they were often paid not directly to the families, but to the middlemen who controlled the tools and the food and the credit, and entire families depended on the mines and created this cycle of dependence that was like it must have felt. It was utterly inescapable. And illiteracy was widespread. And leaving the mines usually meant one thing. Leaving the mines meant starvation. It was either that or you ran. And this, those mines, that was my family's true, true story. Now, before we got to Sicily, I had hired a local historian to find my family's home and burial sites in Caltennesse. This is very exciting. All right. And we went to go see those. So I'm kind of still not over it, to tell you the truth. I mean, I can picture it like I was there yesterday. The house where they lived, if you can call it a house, it was like a dirt floor tenement. It was windowless, it was dank. It was actually kind of like a prison cell. No running water. So we saw it. It's still in a ghetto today. It's a different kind of ghetto, but it's a total ghetto site. And I remember standing there and saying to the historian, are you absolutely sure this is where they lived? Because you can't even imagine living there. And he said, yes. The record of the city shows that 16 of them lived in this space. I'm not kidding. It was like a jail cell. And then stunned, stunned. I mean, you should see the pictures of us in front of this. Like, we were, like, shell shocked. Then we went over to the graveyard. And my older sister, I think, hearing the echoes of this weird family narrative about this sort of, like, noble family that we had, she was like, literally said something like, I think they're over here in these large crypts. And the guide was like, no, no, your family's over here. We need to keep walking. And we kept on walking, like, over a valley, down. And we kept on walking all the way down a long hill to the paupers section of the graveyard. And it was in that section, that's where we saw where my family was buried. And we could see, like, tombstones of people who died in their 30s and 40s. And then we saw these little tiny stones, these like little pavers, like the size of an envelope with just single names, boys, names on them in my family's area. And these were. These were karusi. These were boys from my family who had died very young, and they were very likely victims of the mines. And I just stood there, like, it all came together. And I just stood there with my sisters, and I was weeping. I had no idea we had no idea. No one had ever told us this was our family Sicily, this poverty, this deprivation. That was their Sicily. And, you know, we hadn't thought to ask. Right, because when you asked, you were told this weird story about, no, you know, the Egyptian and the, and the judge and, like. And if you really started to probe, you were silenced. And, I mean, I sensed that we were not all the things they were saying. I sensed that, but I never dug. And now at that moment, actually in the graveyard, I kind of had this eureka, that, that story. It was like a fabulistic coping mechanism, you know, it was like how, you know, children have imaginary friends. Like you have an imaginary friend when you have no friends. Like, my family had an imaginary history, an imaginary history. It's like a fantasy. And when this dawned on me in the graveyard, I was so overcome by so many emotions. I was grievously sad for my grandmother that she never got to really process her origin story. She must have held so much grief and shame and anger. I mean, I saw the bitterness. I never understood it, but I got it. And I was mad that no one had ever told me my true heritage. Because understanding it, even in that flash of a moment, it gave me such a sense of wonder about where I was in my life. Here we were, these fancy American tourists, and just not very long ago, they were living these lives, and it gave me, I want to tell you, gave me a lot of pride in America and the American dream, which my ancestors had lived. And I mean, my grandmother was a teenager when she came to America with nothing. And her grandchildren were standing in the graveyard. And all of us with our fancy schools and our fancy jobs and our lives were filled with plenty, and they were filled with freedom. I was just overcome. It was like. It was like finding out a brand new story about who I was. And so mainly, I have to tell you, in that moment, I was just filled with gratitude. I felt so thankful for them. I felt so thankful to my grandmother and her mother for running, for running away from that life, for their courage, for their fearlessness. They ran away from death, toward life. You know, people stayed in Caltennesseda. Calta Nasata worked, succeeded for hundreds of years because people stayed, lots of people. But my family ran. They ran towards life. It must have been terrifying. They must have been filled with every uncertain feeling. Nothing was known. They ran to Rochester, New York, and they, they, just because they knew some other Sicilians there, they ran. And I, I, I, I can't believe they did. I'm so grateful that they did. They did it. And in that day in Calta Nceta, I remember how sad. One of my sisters was very sad. And she was like, they suffered so much, we had no idea. And I remember being shocked because actually, after I got over this sort of like, oh, my God feeling, I was like ebullient. I was overjoyed. I kept saying, think of how proud they'd be of us. Think of if they could see us right now. Think if they could imagine us in this graveyard. And we went to college and we own our homes and our children, our grandchildren are happy and free. They fought the battle and they won. It's amazing their courage. They won. They were victorious over the life that was handed to them. And, you know, this did not. It's funny, it didn't really help my sister, she was really distraught. And we went back to our hotel and we had a pretty quiet night. We were supposed to go out and have artichoke grappa that night. And we all decided to stay in. As we all grappled with what it meant to be in our 50s and finally understand that a lot of our upbringing could be explained by generational trauma that we were unaware of because of a coping mechanism, because of a phony narrative that I don't know, that they just hung onto to save their hearts. So what does this all have to do with values? Like, where are we going with this? And I have to say this. I think that that trip to Sicily, that incredible experience, seeing the house and seeing the graveyard and thinking about their journey, that was the night that I started to see that scope was a value. I didn't call it scope then. Becoming you was not born until about four years later. The Welsh Bristol Values Inventory, which names all the values, was not born yet. But I was beginning to form this idea that there was a value around the choices that we make in life, about how big or small a life we want, how safe or unpredictable a life we want. This exists on a continuum. Scope. In many ways, it's like the best named value because scope is self explanatory and we can all exist along this continuum. People who have high scope, they want to swallow the world. They want a bigger life, they want more relationships, more adventure, more travel, more stimulation, more excitement. And they will absorb the chaos. They will take the fear and pain that goes along with it. And people who have lower scope, and these are some of the people who I love the most in the world. There's no better or worse with any value. There's just what's aligned with who you are and what you want. If you have lower scope and what you seek is predictability and containment, less stimulation. You want more psychological safety and sometimes physical safety. And some people are sort of in the middle, like, they want their scope in predetermined doses. Like they'll go on two safaris a year and there's their scope. And the rest of the time it's more predictable. And scope is a value. And like all values, again, we are values agnostics. You're not hurting anyone. There's no better or worse. There's just better or worse for you. But I don't think I saw the. I didn't understand that this was a choice until I realized that it had been a choice for my ancestors. Now, I have happened to know about my high scope my entire life because it has perplexed so many people. When I was in ninth grade, I was reading Notes from the Underground by Dostoevsky, and I came upon this quote, suffering is the sole origin of consciousness. And I was like, that's my quote. That's my spirit animal. I mean, really, what it's saying is, you know, I'll suffer to know I'll suffer. And I thought, sign me up. I'll suffer to know the world. I'll swallow the world. I want to know it all. That's high scope. I said it to my sister, suffering is the origin of consciousness. And the same sister was in the graveyard with me. And she said, you must be joking, Susie. But I have always run towards that notion of life, more life. Even when the consequences were chaos and even when I was in fear. The thing is, that day in Sicily, I had this blinding insight into my instinct to swallow the world or to try to. And it's a value. And my grandmother, my great grandmother must have had it too, to grab her children and to run to America. And I am. I'm just. I'm unspeakably grateful to her for it. I. I'm grateful for her scope. I am grateful for mine. I'm grateful for all my values. And. And you should be, whether it's high scope or low scope. And just knowing your values, that's what I'm especially grateful for, that I understand my values. That's been my life's work with becoming you. It's going to be my life's work forever on. And I hope that this journey to understanding my values with scope in Sicily has somehow illuminated your journey. I mean, you've traveled places and you have your own stories of how you've experienced those places. Like what do those stories tell you about who you really are? What do they tell you about your scope or any other value? Are you happy with how much of each value you're living or not? That is what really matters. That is what really matters. And I learned that not at home, but far, far away. Finding out where my home, my story of home actually started, which was in the sulfur mines. Love Sicily. Okay, we will leave it there with this Sicily story. This story about a new landscape that gave me a totally different eyes for my inner landscape. I hope it's done that for you. I hope it has. This is our second of our three part series. Next week we are going to Guberry where last, just last May I had an experience with my daughter Sophia on Illicite, which I'll be talking about and what it taught me about the value of Eudaimonia and a few other values mixed in as well. Look, if you want to know more about becoming you and what we're doing and about this whole methodology or anything else, you can go to susiewelch.com sign up for the newsletter, will you? And also do me a solid and subscribe to this podcast and leave a comment like I loved hearing about Sicily. I want to try artichoke grappa or something like that. I am grateful to my whole team which makes this possible. My producer Elisa Zinn is sitting here with me. Thank you Eliza very much. Come back next week and learn more about becoming you, but learn especially more about yourself. I'd love to see you and meet you there. I'm Susie Welch. See you soon.