Happiness is: Two Sides to Everything, a la Budapest

Friends, good morning from New York, after a whirlwind trip to Budapest for teaching class and exploring just wrapped up.   My Friend A and I explored both Buda and Pest in between me working on reports and preparing to chair a conference. 

 

One of the things I love about travel is that I get to see everyday life from someone else’s perspective, because the things you thought you already knew can include all new perspective when looked at from another angle.  Budapest did that for me, in that I once again re-learned the history I THOUGHT I knew as a kid from a completely different viewpoint. 

 

It is a bit like going home for the holidays to a family in which you no longer quite fit, even though you love them so and try very hard to maintain your very different identity, in order to have a place of your own, while also respecting their very different, and, to me at least, very foreign take on life.

 

My analogy is having 5 people in one family tell the exact same story with very, very different feelings and thoughts and memories about the exact same experience.  None of those individual perspectives is wrong or bad or lies or the ultimate truth.  Instead, as we roll fast into the holiday season and perhaps have some, well, anxiety and a tendency to crave bourbon when thinking about going home for the holidays (is it just me?  Suuuure it is…), that we consider once again taking a deep breath and letting each individual person’s truth be just that…their individual truth, whether or not we agree with it or think it’s crazytalk. 

 

And let’s be clear, I write that for my own self more than any of you, because I am going to have to practice this little meditation a thousand times this season, and I am mentally preparing for it.  Holidays stress me out so much that my throat closes, my heart races, my mouth dries up, and my chest hurts. 

 

“Happy holidays” I have never quite understood, for as long as I can remember I have dreaded them, counting the moments until I could go to bed, because this one place I am supposed to be so welcome to be home and just be myself is the one place I cannot be any of that and am instead expected to fill some 35 year outdated role of whom I never was in the first place.  I am not the same person I was back then, and I never will be again.  Which brings me back to Budapest, believe it or not.

 

Budapest is the first place I truly felt like they flawlessly integrated the old and the new, the history and the growth, the change and the tradition.  Budapest is excellent at it.  I want that.  Please, Santa, I want that.

 

Budapest does that thoughtfully, so gently, even as we heard stories from our guide about terrible history, about him as a 9 year old boy starving for years during war, about him stepping over some of 30,000 dead people in the street walking home.  Intense, even as the lovely, rebuilt city(ies) is now surrounded by loveliness and beauty.  I never heard these stories as a kid in school.  I did not know how my country’s decisions impacted this man’s life, as we had learned that history from 2 very different angles.  The look in his eyes when he answered my gentle questions about how life was different back then, different from anything I ever knew, included both of us doing that careful dance not to offend the other and instead learn from each other.  His 60 something year old eyes became those of when he was a young boy:  frightened, sad, exhausted.  I will never forget that moment that moment, as I touched his arm gently and thanked him before we changed the subject.  I cannot know how that felt, as that is not my story, but I am aware of how it impacted him, and for that reason, I felt compassion and a careful sense of respect and kindness.  I will keep that close to the important things, the Heart Things I must remember in this lifetime, those lessons I did not have to learn personally but those things other people learned and about which I must be always aware.  He, too, was an example of old and new, together, living side by side.

 

So, back to Buda and Pest.

 

Here are a few pictures of the architecture that blew my mind as they combined old and new, history and modern life.  Heroes’ Square and the nearby park with its chapel and museum and ice skating rink were especially powerful and gorgeous.  Such thoughtful sight lines, such beautiful placement of the statues and street lights and details.  I could have stayed here all day and never finish seeing details that amused and thrilled me.

 

Local streets, with their side by side history and modern architecture, traditions and people were so perfectly matched---so differently than other places I visited where it feels smashed together and angrily crowded instead of integrated---made me see how things so very different could exist side by side, without one disrupting the other.  Sorta like families, on their best days, I suppose.

 

We had dinner of traditional Hungarian specialties---osetra and beluga caviar, chicken paprikash, cucumber vinaigrette salad with whipped sour cream and paprika, goose liver (foie gras) salads….all glorious and wonderful, old and new, as the preparations included both.

 



And so, as I look back on this most recent adventure of mine and think about Budapest’s excellence, I feel hope that maybe, just maybe, families across the world, with all of their 180 degree ferocious differences, can maybe figure out how to just be, side by side, not disrupting the other, and instead, bring out the best in each other as we learn from each other and recognize that we will see things from different angles, but all have a place to fit as we are compassionate and patient with each others’ stories even as we take careful care of our own.

 

Friends, this is my hope this holiday season, but I am a businesswoman, a practical woman, and I have to admit that I have also stocked up on bourbon, and you probably should, too.  As I prepare to morph again from medical research to working in my favorite kitchen, I, too, see the duality in myself, the two sides to everything, and I will be gentle with both of those sides, too.

 

 

With lots of love from New York,

Your Good Friend Sarah