Learning How to Live

“Do Americans even know how to live?”

That was the question rattling around in my head—a comment from a reader of mine—as my wife and I drove through France for twenty-seven days.

It’s an important question, one that in some shape or form I’ve been asking most of my life: What do you do with a human life?

The truth is I don’t know, which is why I travel. It’s why I keep moving around and observing people. Surely someone, I think, knows the answer. Surely someone knows how to live.

I am not sure I am right about that, but I keep moving anyway.

After you land in Paris and rent a car and wait politely for them to find it, remembering that things move more slowly in France, you quickly orient yourself on how to drive in a new country.

Then the cityscape quickly turns to rolling fields, and you start to feel the openness of what you’ve just done, the liberty of the experience you are about to undertake.

In Troyes, our hotel for our first night in a new place was an old inn supposedly used to house the Knights Templar. After that, we made our way to Lyon, stopping in Beaune for a quick lunch and to pick up a couple of bottles of wine to enjoy in the South.

In Lyon, the jet lag hit hard, and it was difficult to leave our hotel before noon each day. The second day, we accidentally slept until the middle of the afternoon, forgetting where we were or that we had anything important to do at all.

I have long since stopped feeling bad about these things, about getting much-needed rest even at a time when there is so much to see and do.

I learned this lesson back in college when a group of friends and I took a nap in the middle of the day at a hostel in Rome then woke up at dinner time, realizing we’d slept away most of the afternoon. First we panicked, then we laughed about it, and finally we put ourselves back together and headed out for the evening.

On that trip, instead of seeing the Coliseum we ended up as guests on an Italian TV game show, and for a few short seconds, I was on camera in front of an audience of three million people. Instead of taking the same photos everyone else takes of the same old stuff, we just made ourselves available to serendipity: eating cheeseburgers outside the Pantheon, accidentally stumbling upon the Trevi Fountain, and serenading a group of tourists in one of Rome’s busiest squares.

I learned then that it was better to discover something new, even in yourself, in another place than it was to check off a list of things everyone does. I learned that what matters most is who you become in the process.

So, in France, my wife and I slept. We slept long and hard, and we did this for days. We were tired, bone tired, more exhausted than we realized. And this is why it’s always good to pick a hotel you don’t have to leave.

When we awoke, we visited a bookstore, ate dinner, and walked around the city for a while, doing what we always do, which is just walking, talking, and looking at things. What else is there to do with a life?

On our way out of town, I ran to a quick bakery and grabbed some pastries, a sandwich, and a slice of quiche—which fed us for the rest of the day.

Leaving Lyon on your way south, you drive through the Rhone valley, and the whole topography transforms into a mix of snowcapped mountain peaks, fortified medieval villages, and the dry landscape of wine country.

It reminded me of California.

Entering Provence, we stopped in a city called Orange where we ate our lunch in front of a two-thousand-year-old triumphal arch, then toured a Roman amphitheater, trying to dodge the heat and failing. We drank a Coke, which is always somehow better elsewhere, and continued our drive down to the Riviera.

It took longer than we thought to reach our final destination, but there is nothing like approaching the Mediterranean Sea for the first time. A whole world opens up to you. You feel it rushing at you, bringing you into the wine-dark sea of Homer, the birthplace of the color azure.

You hear the echoes of so many stories, from the travels of Saint Paul to The Count of Monte Cristo to this feeling that you, too, could do something grand, something connected to everything.

And there, in that small little seaside town, we made our home for two weeks.

Our rental was small, a split-level flat where the bedroom was on one floor and the kitchen and living room were on another.

Each morning, I would wake before my wife, climb up those stairs, and step outside on a little terrace where I would do yoga while I listened to the children scream and shout and play at the school across the street.

Then we’d have our coffee and breakfast, almost always some croissant or the little brioches with chocolate chips in the middle, which my wife loved. Some days, we’d stay in all day and read our books. I would check in with clients and catch up on work, but for the most part, we were free to fill the day with as little or as much as we wanted.

Other days, we’d go out into the world. We’d walk, shop, or explore; but most often, we’d just find a cafe with some shade and a patio where we could sit, talk, and sip on a drink. These are always our favorite days, where we while away an afternoon doing nothing but sitting and watching the world go by.

We took day trips to Cassis and Aix-en-Provence and bought souvenirs for our kids and had a few memorable meals. At times, we found ourselves searching for something we couldn’t find and my wife remarked, “Maybe what we are looking for is not a somewhere but a somewhen.”

After a couple of weeks, we started to get the swing of things. I finally synced up my schedule to the local markets and found a good butcher. We discovered a good coffee shop and began to relax into more of a daily rhythm.

And then, just as soon as we were getting used to it, it was time to move on.

On our trek north, we first stopped in Carcassonne, where we ate cassoulet outside a castle and enjoyed a simple bed and breakfast for a night hosted by a couple. The husband, who was French, made us breakfast in the morning; and his wife, who was British, told us about their children and the hotel they used to own in England.

As we continued our drive, I marveled at the changing topography once again— watching the Pyrenees poke through the clouds, seeing road signs change from French to Spanish to Basque. This is always what fascinates me about France, about nearly anywhere outside America: the low-key presence of so many different cultures all in one relatively small place.

Depending on where you are in France, you can see and taste a lot. Where we were, there was Italian pasta and Spanish olive oil. There were North African spices and a Middle Eastern beat to the music. There were baked goods from Austria, butter from Normandy, and Celtic sea salt. There was a whole host of cultures that seemed to absorb us, instructing that a home doesn’t have to be one place but many.

In Cognac, we stayed at a secluded resort and took our dinner and breakfast on the terrace, which is where and how we often prefer to dine—by ourselves, outside, and with a view. Then we continued our journey north until the whole country changed before our eyes one last time, turning from hot, almost desert-like climate to something greener, and more English looking.

Ah, Brittany. The air was cooler here, the people somehow more familiar. The sea looked different too. And it was. This was the Atlantic now, where some of the biggest waves in Europe ascend and fall.

We checked into our coastal home, where we would be hosting a retreat of a dozen writers for the next week, and then picked up some old friends from the train station. Together, we enjoyed a patio dinner of savory, buckwheat crepes—native to that region—filled with various meats and cheeses.

Then there was the retreat: the beautiful, lavish spreads of food each day prepared by our friend Talia Bunting; the daily runs along the Breton coast, which just might be my favorite stretch of beach in the whole world; the pastries, the ice cream, the late-night sunsets, and of course the tide coming in and out every night like clockwork.

Together, we wrote poems and pieces and shared them at dinner. We discussed All the Light We Cannot See and took a tour of old Saint-Malo. We talked about our fears and creative aspirations, admitted our own insecurities, and we all, collectively, started to slow down and savor what was in front of us.

It’s hard to put it all in words, and I’m leaving so much out, but what I’m trying to say is that the thing I was searching for all this time was, in fact, seeking me— calling me to quiet my soul and enjoy the view.

I finally started to listen.

When the retreat was over, my wife and I took the train back to Paris just in time for the start of a heat wave and a city-wide annual music festival. That didn’t deter us, though, from walking everywhere, up and down the great big hill of Montmartre multiple times a day, taking in the unmatchable sights of this unforgettable city that never tires of you marveling at it. We took very few photos and did not do “big things.” And we had a blast.

On the last night of our trip, the music festival was in full flow, and we witnessed it as we spent the final hour of our evening walking back to our rental in one of the most “out there” neighborhoods of Paris.

I spent my last few euros on a baguette, a cookie, two bags of chips, some ham from Bayonne, and a brick of Norman butter. This was our supper for our final night in France, a supper I always reach for when I am tired and out of money and happy to enjoy the simple pleasures of life.

So we ate our sandwich with our chips and that wonderful cookie and washed it all down with a great big bottle of water, hearing the busker play his music on a loudspeaker outside Sacré-Cœur.

The next morning, we almost missed our flight because it took over an hour for our Uber ride to come pick us up in that far-flung part of the city at a time when many in France were not yet again. Then we spent fifteen hours getting home, and when we landed, I arrived to a text from my dad saying that it must have been “the trip of a lifetime.”

I told him I certainly hoped not.

P.S. Oh, and we ate French tacos.