L'Chaim! — Ellen Urbani

“Go out into the world today and love the people you meet. Let your presence light new light in the hearts of others.”

— Mother Teresa

I’ve been thinking a lot about love of late.

In particular, I’ve been thinking a lot about the bold claim by social psychologist Barbara Frederickson, a Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, that our collective fixation on the idea of love as an intimacy that is manifest most ideally and/or exclusively in romantic relationships is demonstrative of “a worldwide collapse of imagination.” The clarion call she issues is this: we must expand our definition of love. It would behoove us, she postulates, to see all moments of sincere, authentic connection with anyone – strangers, casual acquaintances, fellow community members – as manifestations of love given and love received that are no less meaningful or important to our well-being than the connection we have with a romantic partner. Dr. Jeffrey Rediger, psychiatry professor at Harvard Medical School, concurs, and his research suggests that people who have honed a capacity to capitalize on moments of random connection with others – “a sort of ‘falling in love,’ if you will, with the people who surround you on a day-to-day basis” – may reap profound mental and physical health benefits. And in his new documentary Live to 100: Secrets of the Blue Zones, Dan Buettner calls out studies demonstrating that “casual social interactions we have during the day with the postman, with the person you meet at the bus stop, with the baristas [what Dr. Frederickson would call micro-moments of love if only we frame them that way], are actually a better predictor of longevity than diet and exercise.”

Perhaps you’re thinking: leave it to the freshly-divorced gal gallivanting about the world solo to knock romantic partnership and assert that love can be found in any quarter. I acquiesce, and won’t fault you if you and your cynicism stop reading right now. But here’s the thing: I’m as much of a sucker for romance as the next person and still I wonder: what if … what if … they’re not wrong? How might my world be more expansive were I to believe and act on the theory that love in all its storied splendor is already around me, every day, waiting for me to notice it (to accept it, to transmit it) in the smallest of gestures, in the simplest of kindnesses, in the tenderest of words? This isn’t an argument for the cessation of partnership; far from it. I’m just wondering if maybe it’s possible we’re missing out on something important if we’re not willing to fall a little bit in love, every day, with the postman too.

The hitch, of course, is that to have loving interactions with relative strangers one must first summon the chutzpah to deliberately interact with strangers. Whereas isolation, even for this extrovert, is so much easier, for it happens naturally just by doing nothing.

In a determined effort to combat the allure of inertia, I followed a sign tacked to a hotel message board leading to a nighttime gathering in a Lisbon basement.

The sign advertised a Toastmasters club and I’ve always wondered what went on at Toastmasters meetings, so I crashed their party. In a stroke of providence – which, incidentally, always seems to expand for me in proportion to my willingness to take risks – it was the only English-language Toastmaster’s club in Portugal. All the speeches, reviews, and feedback transpired in English-only, all the time, yet I was the only native-English speaker in the room. A few Portuguese populated the group but it was otherwise a wild assortment of immigrants (Russian, Nigerian, Korean, German, Brazilian, Australian, Spanish …), all of whom joined the club as a means of studying/improving their English while also acquiring Portuguese. Let me break this down for you: I happened upon a crew of world travelers challenging themselves to do a hard thing well, before an audience(!), to facilitate learning and personal growth. Y’all, meet my tribe.

I could go on and on about all the things I admired about the folks in this club, but in service to the point at hand – the question of whether and how love can be exchanged between casual acquaintances – I’ll cut to this:

Each night, two prepared speeches are delivered at the outset. I can’t remember the first speech but the Nigerian man spoke second about what it felt like to leave his family and his familiars to emigrate from Africa, the only home he’d ever known, and establish himself in Portugal with, initially, nothing more than a single wooden kitchen chair. He spoke with a smile about things that made my heart hurt and leap for him in equal measure.

Per club protocol, after the planned speeches the emcee chose a couple other attendees to deliver short, off-the-cuff speeches in response to a prompt. The other two first-timers declined to participate before the emcee asked me, so I knew I could demure, but to do so would have violated a personal policy I hold fast to: when traveling, say yes to every invitation extended by a local. As such, I stepped up and riffed off the theme introduced by the Nigerian man about accepting loss in service to dreams. I admitted a deep truth, one that shame otherwise inclines me to elide: that I'd felt compelled to leave my home in order to cultivate a space where all the various aspects of me might more freely reside. Me, the writer. Me, an adventurer and an explorer. Me in an aging body that greets some endeavors with increased zeal, others with less. Me who full-body dives into every deep end and enjoys letting my mind swim around there, immersed. Me who loves much about farm life but is not a forever farmer; maybe not a forever anything. For two minutes I told them what I wish for, what I fear I might not get, what I hope I won’t regret. In short: I showed up, unprotected, and let them see me.

Then the next guy took center stage and totally rocked it. He was creative and polished, with perfect inflection and pitch that rose and fell and carried the audience like surfers on a glossy wave, and he moved like he owned the room, his gestures deliberate and compelling, his points precise and well-considered. How he did that with only 30 seconds of prep I’ll never know. I wanted to bow to him when he finished, and if I could have voted for him four times I would have, he was that good.

Yep: there was voting. But not until after the critiques (critiques!), delivered by pre-assigned critics who took notes and operated clock timers and sounded buzzers if you used filler words while speaking:

“ummm…” BUZZ!

“like …” BUZZ!

“so …” BUZZ! BUZZ!

Not surprisingly, I got called out for my hand gestures, which is totally valid. (I come from a long line of wild gesticulators. Servers have been known to duck in restaurants when my family gets to talking. The fact that none of us has ever had a bowl of soup land in our laps is perhaps the surest proof of God I’ve ever encountered.)

But I digress.

I voted for the other guy. He was the clear winner. And yet, I won.

I thought maybe it was rigged (maybe the newbie always ‘wins’ so she’ll be encouraged to come back) but I think not: the voting was electronically tallied via a smartphone app (y’all, these people are serious). Me winning when the other guy was such a better speaker made no sense unless I looked at it through this prism: I wasn’t polished, I wasn’t professional, I wasn’t concise (am I ever?) … but I was vulnerable. I looked those strangers in the eye and admitted my deep truth. I spoke to them as if they were my intimates. I handed them my heart by speaking to them with love.

And they responded lovingly. They held my heart gently; they lifted it up, just as Dr. Frederikson would have predicted. I have a prize ribbon to prove it.