Dimmi Tutto Da Capo

If you’re familiar with my digital designs, you know that the phrase “dimmi tutto da capo” shows up on a few of my Italian themed designs. I wanted to reflect on this saying more, and really dig into why I love it so much.

tell me everything from the beginning

I come from a family of storytellers. “Visiting” with family and friends often meant sitting around some common table or in a living room “visiting”. Hot beverages turn into cold ones as the days and nights progress, voices going coarse from constant jibber-jabbing, and into late hours. People would stay at our house so that they would wake up to “visiting” and go to sleep after a long day of “visiting”.

For the better part of two decades we lived in a small town outside of a small city, so “visiting” is what we did. There weren’t a ton of tourist attractions to head off to. Sometimes “visiting” would be taken to the road, in a caravan, where parties would split to their “visiting” crews and follow along the thruway across NY to either New York City or Niagara to see the falls. But a lot of times “visiting” was by the pool, over the grill, or simply in one of our living rooms.

And boy can my family tell stories. It’s often a competition to see who can tell more, funnier, and more outrageous stories. I do remember one “visit” of some long-time family friends, we were at some zoo, and my dad and our friend were comparing injury stories. Just rattling off all of the ways each of them almost died, lost a limb, or some other key part of their body. Eventually my dad gave up when she ended the competition with having given birth.

I’m married into a generally quiet family. They tell stories, but nothing as loud and raucous as mine. Whenever I get a little loud, I like to re-ground myself by reminding all of them: I’m the quietest of the Burchfields. We all laugh. Those skeptical of this statement are reassured by my in-laws who have met the rest of my family. “No really. She is.”

a life lived

These stories come from lives lived.

Both my parents grew up in Air Force families. Having traveled the world from a very early age, they have stories from all over. In my dad’s case, injuries from all over. I grew up with all of the adults in my life telling me stories of youthful adventures, lessons learned, ironic misjudgments, and funny adventures. This staged me for a life where nearly every experience I have becomes an anecdote. This story-like framing followed me through my college years, study abroad sessions in Italy, and early adulthood when I tested the waters in Boston to eventually return home to Western NY. These experiences piece together to build out what is now my story, one short-story at a time, in the form of a lesson to carry forth into whatever comes next. A joke, because if you don’t laugh you cry. A way to mourn the lost and carry them on into the next generation. A reason to try that new thing. A thing of comfort when facing an obstacle. A cup of coffee and conversation with a friend.

dimmi

“Tell me”, but in a song-like word, “dimmi”.

“Talk to me”, but with two syllables that just roll off the tongue, “dimmi”.

The Italian language is one of romance and song. Everything just flows.

Storytelling is an age-old tradition. It’s how we pass on morals and life-saving information. Stories stick in our heads better than facts. It shows up in most fields. Marketing experts will tell you to attach a story to the product you’re advertising. Data visualization specialists will look at a Dashboard and look for the story it tells. User experience developers are story-boarding how the interface works with and for the user.

The word “story” can mean so many things in so many contexts, but I think my favorite part of the definition is “the evolution of something.”

Entirely vague. “Something” can be anything. The key word in that part of the definition is “evolution”. It’s not just that the “anything” exists. It’s that the “anything” has evolved. It started in one place, something happened, and then it evolved to be where it is now.

That framework is what drives our history, present, and future. It’s what makes humans who we are. It drives empathy, compassion, learning, love, curiosity, and so much more. It has the ability to also close us down through hate, anger, resentment, and jealousy. We can choose how we frame the story, though. How we pass it on, and how we help evolve our futures.

dimmi tutto da capo

We tell stories to process things. Find our beginnings, middles, and ends. Find comfort and trust that our past has prepared us for our future. Find connections with others.

“Tell me everything from the beginning” is just that encouragement needed to sit down with a hot beverage and listen to it all. Choosing the beginning is a tricky part of story telling. Go back to far, you’re boring folks. Start too late, and your listeners are lost. The art of story telling is not only identifying the evolution of the story, it’s knowing where to start, and when to end it. It’s drawing out the punch line, the joke, or the anecdote you want the listener to take with them.

It’s that two-way-street of passing along something that feels ever-important while getting some sort of gratifying return from the listener. A hug for a hard story. Compassion for a story of obstacle. Laughter for a humorous anecdote. Or an a-ha moment for a lesson learned, something they hadn’t thought of.

Together we can process our infinite world of experiences and individuals. Together we can pass along important information to our future generations. Together we can laugh, cry, mourn, and learn. All this through stories.