Category: happiness

change, happiness, New York

On NYC: What gets rewarded

Christa Avampato

NYC is a tough place to live. On the surface it may appear to be all fun and games. It’s not – this city and living in it is serious stuff, not for the faint of heart. People manage it in all different ways – after thinking they can hack it in the thick of it all, they grow tired and weak. Some move to a new borough, or a new state if it’s really bad. They get new roommates, a new job, new friends, new hobbies. They cry, scream, join a gym. Some just hide under the covers hoping tomorrow they will wake up in a more polite, less crowded, quieter NYC, only to be disappointed that overnight the city seems to have grown more rude, more crowded, and nosier.

And don’t forget how damn expensive it is to live here! I won’t even tell you what I pay in rent – it’s horrifying, and I have the best deal in town. I recently went to Disney World for the day with my sister, Weez, and brother-in-law, Kyle. (They live near Orlando.) You know you’ve lived in NYC too long when you think the prices for Walt Disney World concessions are cheap.

So what’s a girl to do? I’ve tried all of the strategies I listed above. I have had horrible roommates, and even more horrible bosses in years past. I tried to moving to a borough, and several other states. I got new friends, and saved my good old ones too. I’ve tried new hobbies, volunteering. I’m quite adept at hiding under the covers, and I consider myself to be an expert screamer and crier when the tension gets too much. I have never joined a gym here – I put initiation fees on par with broker fees. “Oh, please, let me give you an outrageous sum of money to have the right to pay you an even greater sum of money on a monthly basis for the privilege of being in your presence.” No thanks – I’ll take to running on the streets of NYC.

The best remedy I’ve found for surviving and ultimately coming to love NYC – keep showing up. Truly. Falling in love with this city is a long, slow, and very painful process. It takes deep commitment. It plays hard to get better than all of us combined. And it wins every time. The harder you fight its freakish, bizarre happenings, the more it will throw at you.

And then one day you turn the corner to your apartment, or fly over Manhattan to land at one of the city’s airports, and you realize there is no place in the world like your New York. You meet good people. You find that dream job. You nurture and develop hobbies that complete you. Sometimes it takes a few tries – it took me 3. And now I know I could never call another place home. It’s true that if you can make it here, you make it anywhere. Trouble is that once you’ve made it here, you’ll have a hard time wanting to make it anywhere else – you fought too hard to make this work. And just when you’re ready to throw in the towel, it relents. Anything worth having is worth fighting for, right?
change, Darden, experience, family, graduation, grandmother, happiness

A Sense of Place

Christa Avampato

A Sense of Place

May 20th would have been my grandmother’s 88th birthday so my Darden graduation on that date has a dual-significance for me: it is the celebration of my greatest academic accomplishment and of a woman whom I consider to be my greatest teacher. She was born Sarah Louise Gagliardi, though I knew her as Sadie Lupinacci. She was born to blue collar immigrant parents on Barber Street in Hartford, Connecticut. She was a life-long employee of Traveler’s Insurance Company. She had two children: my mother, Sandy, and my uncle, Tom. She was married to my grandfather, Alfonso Lupinacci, for over 40 years until his untimely death in 1982. They were childhood sweethearts and grew up around the corner from one another. She led an ordinary life. Nothing extravagant. Nothing extraordinary.

Yet she was an extraordinary person – the kindest, most loving person I have ever known. She had a remarkable sense of forgiveness and an endless supply of support for those she loved. When anyone asks me what kind of person I aspire to be, I consider that I wish to love and be loved the way my grandmother was, and still is. She came from so little, and I have so much which is why I feel a tremendous amount of gratitude for the opportunity to be a part of this community and this graduating class.

I came to Darden to attain traditional financial skills because that was a clear hole in my resume. This was the explicit learning. While I was able to reach this goal, there were implicit learnings that I did not expect to find which are just as valuable, if not more. I learned about the idea of lifting as we rise, that there is so much more satisfaction in climbing the ladder with people we admire and care about along aside us rather than climbing over others and being alone.

I spent a lot of time here considering the idea of happiness, of accomplishment. Defining it, setting benchmarks, reflecting on what’s working in my life and what’s not, and then taking on the responsibility to change, even when that change is painful or frightening. And I am continually reminded of the idea that what we wish to have in our own lives we set about attaining by providing that very thing for someone else. So if it is happiness we seek, we can begin to have it by providing happiness for another. The same goes for success, personal and professional, for peace of mind, for friendship, and, as my grandmother showed me, for love.

I learned how devastating it can be to think I’m on a road that I built going one way, and all of a sudden the bottom falls out and I end up on a path I never knew existed and probably would not have chosen by my own volition. Surprisingly, I learned to love the new road, and even became grateful that the Universe presented it to me. Resiliency and the ability to see possibility in all opportunities are great blessings that I found here.

And most importantly, I learned about the power of place. I have a friend who talks about the metaphor of a great vein of life running just beneath the Earth’s surface. Sometimes we come upon physical places that have special significance though we cannot pinpoint the underlying reason for that feeling. She says that at those points, the vein of life emerges for us to grab a hold of and experience an intensity of emotion that we do not find in the course of our everyday lives. The places where the vein emerges makes us feel alive; make us feel connected to one another and at cause with the world around us. Darden has been one of those places for me, and I hope it has been for everyone who has the privilege to call this beautiful place home, even just for a little while. I look forward to returning again and again in the years to come, and I am so excited to see how our lives unfold, intertwine, and connect.