Pursuit of happiness with “la cuntintizza”

Happiness in the small reasons for living

It happened during the pandemic, one of the many threads of hope that needed to be held on. After all, it would also serve today: war covers all thoughts but we can always be inspired by the grace with which the broom grows despite the ashes. They write it Simonetta Agnello Hornby, Sicilian-born writer and lawyer living in London, and Costanza Gravina, her niece, in It cuntynizes it (Mondadori), one reasoned list of memories and emotionsof small reasons for living.

The philosophy of being satisfied

«I believe in life, even if mine is not easy because I have a disabled child. A lot of wisdom comes to me from my mother, I remember that she took long walks in the countryside surrounded by cats and dogs. When she returned then they ran away from her because they were alone with her. Never seen such a thing. Cuntintizza also means to be satisfied with what life gives us. I think it is a widespread attitude especially among Sicilian women. Seeing the best everywhere, feeling the desire to do good. As a child they told me to put aside the toys for the children who didn’t have any, they gave me a pin of real pasta and it was my “sop” ».

So is it a sense of well-being related to childhood? “It’s true, my cuntintizza is linked to childhood, to the affection of my parents, to the presence of my cousins. I have been living abroad since the age of 21 and have lived with memories. Anyone, however, can have hers, “Hornby, 76, points out from the phone of her Sicilian house.

Let’s remember serendipity

Finding happiness in a painting. Detail of the Spring by Sandro Botticelli, datable to 1478 and kept in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. (Getty Images)

It is a pleasure to hear it and suddenly I am reminded of the word “serendipity“. “Whoever has cuntintizza is serendipic, of course. He lives inside a pink cloud, the kind you see in the sky at dawn. What would the British call it? Contentment. The English language is bad in sound but beautiful in content. I lived the pandemic away from children and friends, we thought about protecting ourselves. There was a telephone but it wasn’t enough. I lacked tact. My mother told me to teach my children to recognize fabrics, the feeling of wool, sponge, nylon. Touching the ironed sheets is cuntinting for me. As is the scent of orange blossom, the face and the cloister of San Giovanni degli Eremiti in Palermo. There, in that garden surrounded by neat and small columns, so sensual and architecturally clean, the monks meditated, chatted. I feel such a sense of cuntintizza every time I go to visit it. The same one they give me almond or pistachio desserts, the best in the world »adds the writer.

The first coffee of the morning

The cuntintizza by Simonetta Agnello Hornby, Costanza Gravina, Mondadori€ 19.00

And it is speaking of sweets that Costanza Gravina, 40, a pharmacist from Palermo, explains to me her cuntintizza and the relationship with her aunt. «I found her when I grew up, we found ourselves united by a great complicity. We had been wanting to write something together for a long time. During the lockdown, we were often on the phone and distracted ourselves by talking about family anecdotes. Of “cosuzze”. These are little things that make us feel good and that we often forget. My cuntintizza has a strong genetic component because gathering around the kitchen table has always been an important family moment. Everything we learned there is handed down to the grandchildren, it is the invisible thread that holds us together. With a recipe we do not forget who has disappeared. In the kitchen, for example, I use grandma Teresa’s notebook »says Gravina who also writes about food in a Palermo magazine.

“My cuntintizza smells like first coffee in the morning. It has the face of my grandmother Teresa. And it is a puzzle of places: the sea of ​​Favignana, the countryside where we used to go as children, the historic center of my city ».

Each cuntintizza can have unthinkable origins

We are talking about memories: does anchoring to them make us feel good? “I think it’s a question of sensitivity, which needs to be taken care of. I’m optimistic, you can get strength from the little things »concludes Gravina. The suspicion that someone, even a foreigner, does not understand her does not even touch Aunt Simonetta. «I am and I feel European, the distances are not so great between peoples. Each cuntintizza can have unthinkable origins. In literature, for example. I think of Achilles’ tears when Patroclus dies, in the verses that the great Just Monk taught me. In cinema, and I think of Charlie Chaplin’s films because basically cuntintizza is simple. It is to seek the harmony of things, a very different feeling from happiness that appears in flashes. In these troubled years, I realized that it was necessary to start again from these little things that I had taken for granted, overwhelmed by the frenzy “confesses Hornby.

“We need to protect them, cultivate them. Learn to reflect. I’ve never been good at meditating but it can help us keep our antennae awake, recognize that little thing that passes through the senses and leads to love “she concludes.

Happiness is measured

The roads of the Cuntintizza are therefore endless and they arrived at the Tibetan Institute Lama Tzong Khapa in Pomaia (Pisa), the place where a course held by Connie Miller, a Buddhist nun of American origins, and Nicola De Pisapia, a researcher, recently concluded. of the University of Trento which measured the effects of meditation on the perception of happiness: it came out The art of happiness, a study conducted with La Sapienza of Rome. «More than meditative I call them“ contemplative ”practices» explains De Pisapia who for years has been dealing with protocols to measure their effects in schools and now in prison.

«The assumption is that happiness is determined by the state of mind rather than by external events. Our mind is present like a pair of glasses that we forget we have on our nose. Meditating means cleaning your glasses, taking care of the mind before it breaks. It means evaluating, becoming aware and placing things within a cosmic trend. With these practices one feels contentment rather than happinessAdds the researcher who thinks back to the Stoics of Ancient Greece.

It’s a question of training

“It comes out when we step back to look inside ourselves, when we observe secondary aspects or when we move away from our little ego to embrace a broader perspective. At that moment we are observing and perceiving, we are contemplating. It is not easy to carry out these practices in everyday life. In Pisa people trained every weekend for nine months. They also had a diary in which they wrote down everything, in the end we measured the changes that emerged regarding the perception of stress, anxiety, emotions etc. The effects? Greater sense of satisfaction with one’s life, greater awareness and less anxiety.

More than increasing positive emotions, negative ones actually decrease. Those who want to work on positive feelings must theoretically prepare to know how the human mind works and then do even very simple practices such as learning to focus on a perfume “he adds. Those who feel contentment are essentially contemplative, they see nothing negative. «The psychopathology around us is alarming and depression is rampant even among children. Indulging in small contemplative practices today is important »concludes De Pisapia. It is as much as unraveling an invisible thread, aligning the joys as if they were beads of every shape, knowing that basically everything is there: in a gust of lightness and wisdom, for many cuntintizza.

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