Heritage & Slow Living

One day, my brother told our father that our uncles had achieved excellent academic results simply because they were particularly intelligent. My father immediately replied that this wasn’t the case: it wasn’t a matter of pure intellect, but rather that they had asked themselves two fundamental questions: “Who am I?” and “What is my story?” When you find an authentic answer to these questions, everything changes; you yourself change, spontaneously, like a flame that lights the way and sweeps away all background noise.

Throughout my three-year college journey, I often asked myself, “Why am I even doing this?” In those moments, one phrase always comes to mind:

I repeat this to myself to remind me that the real challenge for a student of African descent in the West isn’t the color of my skin, but keeping that inner flame alive.

My father started medical school but had to drop out in his second year due to the untimely death of his father and the need to support and raise a large family of younger siblings. Today I know for certain that my parents’ greatest wish is to see me give my all to my studies and achieve solid financial independence. It’s a fairly pronounced cultural trait in several African countries: in Nigeria, for example, there’s a not-so-subtle belief that if you don’t become a doctor or a successful professional, you’ve failed in life...

With my ambition, I feel I’m carrying on the legacy of those in my family who didn’t have the same opportunities I’ve had.

University life puts you in a unique situation: you don’t work, but you’re able to support yourself thanks to a scholarship; you don’t own a home, but you have a place in a university dorm. You’re neither fully independent nor entirely stable, but you have institutions that support you and a family cheering you on. It’s a situation full of compromises, yet still a privileged one.

My father’s generation was driven by a visceral urge: hunger and the absolute urgency to escape poverty to save their families. In that context, there was only one obstacle capable of halting their climb: the material lack of money.

And this is precisely where the generational divide begins. I will never know the poverty my father experienced, and hearing about it through his stories isn’t enough to replicate that same emotional drive. I deeply admire the ironclad determination of those who emigrated from Africa to the West, building their own redemption through education. However, growing up in Italy, fully integrated into the language and customs, it’s easy to slip into a kind of identity amnesia: you forget where you come from, you forget what your family expects of you, and, above all, you stop nurturing your own personal passion.

You find yourself in a limbo: you’re not an African fully rooted in your history (considering you lived in Cameroon for only the first six months of your life), but you’re not fully perceived as Italian either. If, in this limbo, you lack the maturity to question your identity, your parents’ expectations cease to be a guide and become nothing more than an unbearable burden. Passion isn’t innate, it must be cultivated.

The generational conflict between parents and children almost always plays out on two fronts:

But when you break down, analyze, and make that message your own, you reduce it to fine dust and can assimilate it with minimal friction and maximum peace of mind.

I live as if in a “bubble”, that is, a physical and emotional boundary. Within that space, I try to build a balanced daily routine where everything revolves around one priority: my studies. Everything else, the background noise, the distractions, and the expectations others heap upon you, becomes secondary or must be silenced.

It’s not about shutting down your life, but about living it without the anxiety of constant desire.

This is where a personal form of Slow Living🐌🐌 comes into play: not a call for slowness for its own sake or disengagement, but the art of inhabiting the present with intention. It means learning to take joy in the simplicity of your routine, a carefully brewed cup of coffee, the focus of a study session, the silence of the evening, without letting yourself be worn down by the rush for results. In this way, the bubble ceases to be isolation and becomes a sanctuary of balance, where ambition and family pressures don’t burn me out, but steadily fuel the flame.

Embarking on this journey is an act of radical honesty with oneself: it means recognizing that to achieve extraordinary value, one must pay an extraordinary price, without discounts and without recriminations.