La Bella Sicilia is not doing particularly well. With each time I go, the towns I visit become a bit more empty, a bit more ghost-like, more houses barred, more shops closed down. It almost feels like Greece, just slightly better, because at least they don’t have a Prime Minister who refuses to wear a tie while he sulks and pouts.
But the Sicilians are resilient and they’ve found a couple of solutions to survive their poor economy. They either come to Malta, open a restaurant and charge us five times more than they would back home, or else they join the Church.
I always go to Mass when I’m abroad because it is a good way of getting a feel of the community of the place where I am staying. In Sicily, priests are either as old as the Alps or pop-star looking young. Even the church choir is always full of young lively nuns, the ones you know are going to be on that Raffaella Carra Italian X-Factor, singing and dancing.
Given the dire economic condition, having a vocation is a godsend, so to say, and joining a convent is rather convenient. You get a job and a career, you have a roof over your head and you have daily food. It was pretty much always like this throughout history.
If I were born in the Middle Ages, I think I would have very much considered the option of Suor Kristina. A life of meditating, singing, chanting, cooking, eating, farming, reading and sleeping would have been a much better alternative than, well, a life of hunger.
Of course, for the love of good food, I would have first hitched a ride on a corsair ship to Sicily and joined a nunnery there. Food in Maltese convent kitchens smells of cabbage soup, and I would have none of that (I should know: I went to a convent school half my life, and the waft of what’s cooking was always reaching our classrooms).
Why am I pondering all this? I recently stayed in a Sicilian agritourismo that 400 years ago used to be a Carmelitan monastery. It was in the middle of a vast sprawl of countryside and the only sounds you could hear were the rustling of trees, the chirping of birds, the distant ringing of goat bells and the shuffling of your own feet. There was so much peace and quiet that it felt like a sin to talk.
Take time out from the race. It’s good for our health
You could go for hours-long walks with greenery all around you without bumping into anyone. It’s just yourself and you. All this is but a stone-throw away from Malta, and yet… it’s impossible to do that here.
Last month, athlete Jane Caruana, while addressing a protest against development in Żonqor Point, made one of the most valid arguments in the whole saga. We need the space, she said, because if we’re not noticing, the lack of natural space is making us sick. “Not just sick in the body, but sick in the mind,” she said.
That “sick in the mind” quote sort of stuck with me. We need open spaces not just to exercise – we can do that in an enclosed space, in a gym, clad in Lycra, sweating, competing. But we need open spaces as a gym for the mind.
Look at us. Go out in the square of where you live: all you’ll see is people walking about with mouths in the shape of upturned smiles. We barely nod to each other as we pass by in the street, we don’t greet each other with a good morning, we only talk to the person next to us on the bus stop to moan about our “uġigħ”.
Maybe that is why we have so many ailments, because while our forefathers used to sit in peace and quiet at sunset, we barely notice that the sun has set, and instead we sit in front of a multitude of screens.
But maybe now that summer has kicked in, maybe we can do things differently. When earlier in the week I was mumbling that I had no idea what to write about this week, my daughter immediately cried out: “Mama write about holidays! The fun and the joy and the sandcastles!”
So this is a column in praise of summer pootling. Instead of those irritating conversational tics such as “Hi, I’m so busy” or “It’s been manic!” or “Bla nifs”, we can tell each other that we are on “slow mode” and “merely ambling along” and that we are embracing a more genteel pace. It will do our bodies and souls a power of good.
So here’s the plan. This summer let’s join a friend on a rickety boat, let’s sing along to a guitar at a barbecue, let’s hum and whistle, let’s go for evening walks in what’s left of our coastal countryside and let’s talk to each other without a mobile screen in the middle. Take time out from the race. It’s good for our health.
And of course, as Suor Kristina from the Middle Ages would have said: Eat lots of good food.
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Twitter: @KrisChetcuti