Each year I am less enthused with the constant “rise-shine-repair-refresh-repose cycle” of living. It’s not that I’m getting tired of life per se, but I do grow weary from having to accomplish the never-ending maintenance of each day, month, and year. In the moment it can feel like a lot with seemingly little payoff. 

If you’re lucky, your car will be due for scheduled maintenance in one moment, and then at a later time, your boiler will stop working and you have to go hunt down a replacement valve. And then in another moment, you will have to gather up all of your tax forms and ensure you are on track to file before Tax Day. Or there will be a nail in your tire on an afternoon when not much else is going on and you can quickly locate a gommista who will patch things up and send you on your way. These are just some random examples that I have in my head at the moment—and while I recognize that it is a luxury to have only one thing on your plate at a single time, getting it all done at any given time can feel like a real drag.

Whenever I do find myself wading through the tall grass, I really appreciate the unexpected breaks that are sprinkled amongst the monotony. Specifically when my tasks guide me towards meeting an unexpected yet pleasant discovery. A recent example came while waiting in line at an average plumbing/cooling/heating shop located across Rome. 

While waiting for an item to be retrieved in the stockroom, one of the older workers came out and asked his colleagues if they wanted a coffee.  Then he addressed us folks at the counter. Most declined, but it was about time for a mid-morning coffee anyway, and so I was one of the takers. This store is not some kind of fancy sit down store where you wait for an overpriced object to come out and be placed on your lap. The workers are wearing jackets and hats because it is cold inside. There’s a long counter with paperwork stacked no top. Definitely more of the “Get in/Get out” variety that practical plumbers favor. But still, after taking our coffee orders [“Sugar? No sugar?”], he then asked us if we’d like a piece of chocolate to go with it. He’s offering us chocolate? Come on.

But of course when you are asked something like this, I find it hard to say no. Especially when I am already feeling a bit peckish and frazzled from the drive across town and mandatory hunt for parking. So I said yes.  

“Va bene,” he said to us, “Milk or dark?”

Does he have a chocolate shop in the back? No way. He had to be kidding about his offer. Riffing on the fact that there were only storerooms of pipes and valves. But he wasn’t.

What transpired next was a presentation of coffees on a paper plate complete with a napkin on top and squares of chocolate for each of us. I took a bite. The chocolate was good. Really good. 

This is where I will stop boring you with my weekend “To Do” list and tell you about how this coffee break turned into the counter guy telling us about a monastery nearby. They make chocolate. They make jams. Beer. Tea. Before I knew it, he was giving driving directions, saying to leave the shop and get out to the stone wall before making a sharp turn that can be easy to miss.  

While explaining the directions and watching us enjoy the chocolate, another man came in and overheard the conversation. 

“I trappisti?” he asked the worker. A nod in response. “Eh.” the new guy nodded. Clearly my trajectory had taken me into a place that was known to many others but not myself.

Leaving the shop, the next obvious thing to do in my task list was to set aside the pesky tasks. This monastery was too close by—their chocolate too good—to pass up and carry on with other soul sucking work. As an adult, it can seem like our curiosity is often subsumed into a related but overpowering block of work and we don’t have the time to pay it much attention. I kind of feel like it’s important to give that curiosity some personal love in order to feel more balanced overall. Or at least get your brain off of the usual Merry-Go-Round that it tends to stay on.

Once in the car, soon enough that stone wall was found. And with that, the sharp turn and small sign announcing that this was the entrance to the monastery. Inside, there was a fairly small space of green area with several churches. Walking through the main arch entrance, it suddenly felt like I’d left the frenzy of Rome altogether.

Maybe if I were a beer drinker, I’d known that the Trappist Monks have about ten monasteries around Europe where they brew beer—and there is only one in Italy. But alas, this is not my world and therefore this point of interest had never been on my dashboard. But now that I’d arrived, I was not only presented with a charming shop full of beer, teas, alcohol—and yes, chocolate—now I discovered that I had stepped into an important chapter of Christian belief. 

The Trappist Monks occupy the grounds known as the Three Fountains Abbey. There is plenty of reading you can do yourself on this spot (and I am the exact opposite of a religious scholar), but what I learned during this impromptu visit was that I had arrived at the place where Paul the Apostle was said to have been martyred. There is testimony that states that he was decapitated and his head bounced three times on the ground—and in each spot, a source of water sprouted up. Three fountains. 

It was a beautiful afternoon to walk the grounds and learn a bit more about Rome’s history. Of course, I arrived back home with much more than spare parts in. my car. I now had a box containing Trappist chocolate and tea. And why not? Their production is said to support the basic living requirements of the monks with the remaining profit given to charity. It was good enough for me. On the whole, the diversion left me feeling rejuvenated. The last couple of weeks have been quite busy with more than a few things to wrestle on my mental checklist…and indeed I recently lamented that it had been too long since I’d gone out and explored something new. But then a random plumbing guy offered me a coffee with a piece of chocolate. The whole day turned into something completely joyful and it left me grateful for the opportunity to have run errands in a new part of town.

So I’ve still got a laundry list of other super boring crap that I’ve got to get done between now and Tax Day. And maybe if I was really focused, then I could get it all done faster. But we all quite well that there will only be more stuff that will file in behind those boring tasks. Me, I’d rather take the play breaks when they pop up. Not only in the name of self-preservation, but also because clearly there is more delicious chocolate out there to discover. More local culture and history just around the sharp turns. It’s just a matter of winding yourself to the right place without really believing that you’re going anywhere new at all.