Tag: sociology

Giving serendipity a chance

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strolling-around

How beautiful it is when you find something perfectly in harmony with your mood, your interests and your needs, by chance. You are lost in your thoughts and… there it is. A light appears in your road, changing your perspective and making your day happier. It can be the wind slightly moving the leaves of a tree. It can be the smile of a stranger passing by. It can be the sound of a piano playing in an indefinite apartment nearby. It can be the unexpected smell of fresh bread in the street behind a bakery. Those moments are little presents that remind us to appreciate every detail of life.

Too often we are absorbed in the digital stream and we don’t even notice the stimulus coming from the world around. Even when we are wearing the tourists‘ shoes, we can’t expect the trip to be smooth and interesting in every minute. We need to give our inner compass some help. Move the head from the map or phone, look around, walk beyond traditional routes, read residents’ tips, smell the atmosphere, talk with people, ask suggestions.

A few weeks ago I attended a conference where Gianpaolo Nuvolati, Professor of Sociology at the Bicocca University in Milan, presented a project based on the concept of Flanerie. Just as Charles Beaudelaire and other 19th century French poets, a group of students went idling about in a specific area of the city with the sole purpose to live the best of that space. With the help of a guide and a dossier, they learned how to discover the city following a personal narrative, in a way that recalls a flânerie metropolitaine.

Flâneur (pronounced: [flɑnœʁ]), from the French noun flâneur, means “stroller”, “lounger”, “saunterer”, or “loafer”. Flânerie is the act of strolling, with all of its accompanying associations.

With no schedule, no expectations, no prejudice, the flâneur looks around, notices the details, smells the air, feels the essence of a district. Not without reason it has become the archetypal symbol of the modern urban experience. However, strolling around is not enough to give serendipity a real chance. What really matters is being mindful, living the present moment, having an active and child-like approach, interacting with the surroundings and behaving spontaneously.

“What people call serendipity sometimes is just having your eyes open.” Jose Manuel Barroso

Overcoming mess with commuication

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messy

Have you ever felt like swimming in a bubble of confusion and soon later felt happily released right after a genuine talk with a friend? In this post I’m going to focus on the reason why this happens.

You may think that it’s a matter of friendship and it is due to the emotional bond that links you to that person. Not every friend is the same and the relief is proportional to the quality of the friendship. Well, not really.

It can happen with a relative, a child, a colleague and even the doomed person sitting next to us. Yes, sometimes we are so concentrated on a problem that we use a stranger to extern our thoughts and feel better. Literature teaches us that also writing a diary or having a pen friend is an extraordinary tool to manage anxiety and make sense of life.

As I wrote in the last article, storytelling is the way human brain gives sense to its inner mess and puts every circumstance in the right shelf. How does it work?

To explain this, it’s helpful recalling once again Professor of Sociology Paolo Jedlowski. In his book, he defines narration as “sharing stories”. Stories are representations of sequences of events or actions and, by definition, they require a conversation. By telling a story, I package my thoughts about a certain situation, I give them a meaning and an interpretation and eventually I share the package to another person through simple communication.

Interestingly, Jedlowski says that sequence of events are normally messy or opaque. You don’t know exactly how to interpretate the reality around you until you go through the process of making a story out of it and tell it.

The next time you feel messy thoughts, try the storytelling approach and see for yourself.

Storytelling for better life

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minstrels

Today I want to talk to you about one of the topics that passionate me the most, one of the activities that I’ll never be bored of, storytelling. Although this word is having a large success in recent times – in Italy, for instance, it is now associated to cool marketing strategies – this process has been part of human life for a very long time. Building narratives is a natural way that our brain has to make sense of what happens around us and, at the same time, socialize.

“Narrative is like life, it exists in itself, it’s international, transhistorical and transcultural” Roland Barthes

We use stories to communicate, express our feelings, release our tensions, share our experiences,  affirm our ideas, give support, educate, entertain, discuss and, ultimately, to define who we are. From the ancient Greek tragedies to the web series, from the nineteenth-century romance to contemporary poetry, narratives are an essential tool to build our identities. Here’s a note that I found in one of the sociology books I have in my personal library, “Common stories” by Professor Paolo Jedlowski:

– identity is the result of  a self-development work that the individual acts on himself using the symbolic resources that he founds in his social context –

To understand what we are, we need to tell a story. Sometimes the personal novels that we create in our minds and that we tell to explain our lives help us to grow up and find a way to redefine our identity. The bed-time stories that we listen to in our childhood and the books we read every day are strategic in the process of building and re-building a personality through time.

Some sociologists like Jedlowski say that the contemporary community is now losing our oral tradition and slowly losing our ability to tell good stories. I would rather say that things are changing, we now use many different mediums, but we still tell stories. The problem is that we have so many stimulus that often we can make a story of what we are not very interested in, and we desperately need to prioritize our stories, make order before heading to the communication step.

Like it or not, we are all minstrels, wandering on the edge of our thoughts and making show of ourselves to create our comfortable place in the world, either if we write or not. With social networks, we all have a ready-to-use opportunity to share something about us. Even a simple “like” expresses something personal. Think about it. What is the story you are telling now?