I’ve always had a special love for Italy.

Even as a child growing up in Norway, there was something about Italy that fascinated me.

The language, for one thing.

To my ears, Italian sounded almost as though people were singing. Soft, gentle, beautiful.

And then there was the shape of the country itself.

A boot.

With Sicily sitting there at the bottom, almost like a football just about to be kicked. 😊

When I was in school, I think I must have been in 6th or 7th grade, I wrote an essay about Italy.

I can actually remember the cover better than I remember what I wrote.

I drew a detailed map of Italy by hand.

I’ll know more when I get back to Switzerland because, incredibly, I still have that essay. I found it recently in an old box in the attic.

And finding it reminded me of something I’d completely forgotten.

Back then, as a little girl, looking at that map of Italy, I remember wondering…

Hmmm… I wonder what it would be like to live at the tip of Italy, where Italy meets Sicily…

And that was pretty much it.

I didn’t make a plan.

I didn’t spend the following years thinking about how I was going to make it happen.

In fact, I forgot all about it.

Life happened.

Decades passed.

Until I found that old essay again.

And suddenly I thought…

Wait a second!

I’m here.

I now spend months of the year in Coccorino, in Calabria.

And when I go for my daily walk, this is what I see.

This is where I’d put your Stretto di Messina photograph.

Across that beautiful blue water is Sicily.

I can see the Strait of Messina.

The place where Italy meets Sicily.

And on particularly clear days, I can even see Etna in the distance.

I don’t remember spending years trying to make that childhood Wonderation happen.

I don’t remember repeating it every morning.

I certainly didn’t have a step-by-step plan for getting from Norway to this little corner of Calabria. 😂

I wondered.

And then I lived my life.

And somewhere along the way, without me even noticing it…

my life brought me here.

What does that mean?

I don’t know.

And that’s one of the reasons I’m rediscovering Wonderations now instead of pretending I already have all the answers.

Maybe there’s a perfectly ordinary explanation for how our lives gradually move in the direction of things that captured our imagination long ago.

Maybe there’s more to it.

Maybe some Wonderations take a day to answer.

And maybe some take decades.

I don’t know.

But I do know that there’s something rather extraordinary about finding a piece of paper written by the little girl I once was…

then going for a walk…

looking across the water toward Sicily…

and realizing:

She wondered about this.

And now I’m standing in it.

Hmmm…

I wonder how many other things I’ve forgotten that I’ve wondered about. ✨