How to Pizzeria
I was sitting at home with no particular plans, my phone buzzing with the usual noise of group chats.
One message caught my eye—photos of cousins from India traveling through Europe. They thought I was still in Australia. I picked up the phone, called them immediately, and said, “I’m coming.” A few days later, I was in Naples, Italy.
They had been to a pizzeria the night before I arrived. “We have to go back,” they said. I didn’t ask questions. We waited in line for over an hour. Apparently, this was one of the original pizza places in Naples. It had no menu. Four types of pizza. That was all.
When we finally walked in, the energy in the room caught me by surprise.
Laughter floated through the air, not from the tables, but from behind the counter. A young woman tossing dough grinned, radiant and generous. A waiter tapped me on the shoulder, laughing, saying something in Italian I couldn’t understand, even with my vague memory of Portuguese. Then an older man shouted something back across the kitchen, and they both burst into laughter.
Something in me paused.
It wasn’t the pizza—though it was, without doubt, the best I’ve tasted. It wasn’t even the company, though being with family again, in a different part of the world, brought a quiet comfort. It was something else.
The waiter—the one who was taking my order, in the middle of what must have been an exhausting shift—was happier than I was. Less tired. More alive. He wasn’t on vacation. He wasn’t traveling. He didn’t have the luxury of leisure time or the novelty of being in a new country. But he was lit up. At ease. Several shades more joyful than me.
And it was contagious. Laughter reached our table in waves. Smiles began to stretch across our faces as we looked around and saw not just good food being served, but good energy being shared, without effort, without reason.
The next morning, while meditating, I could still feel it. That joy hadn’t passed through me—it had stayed. A presence. A warmth. I started asking myself why. What gives that kind of feeling its staying power?
It wasn’t money. It wasn’t time. I have both, and they weren’t what stood out.
I kept returning to the energy of the people working at the pizzeria. There was a kind of satisfaction I sensed in them, the kind that doesn’t announce itself loudly, but can be felt unmistakably. They were really good at what they did. Not just making pizza, but being present, being together, holding a rhythm that made the whole restaurant hum. And they knew it. Not in a prideful way—but in an embodied way. Like a musician who doesn’t need to overplay, or a dancer who doesn’t need to perform. Just in it. For the love of the craft.
I’ve felt that kind of satisfaction before. Moments from the past drifted in—launching a product at a company I once ran, where everything felt aligned; making guacamole one night for friends, having made it hundreds of times before, each step familiar, the balance of lime and heat just right; the end of a long meditation retreat, where the mind is quiet, the body settled, and presence feels deep and effortless.
There’s a particular kind of joy that comes from doing something well. Not perfectly, but wholeheartedly. It’s less about the outcome and more about the grounding that comes with mastery—not a title or a credential, but a knowing in the bones.
That night at the pizzeria was also a reminder of something else. The joy of doing things with others. The staff weren’t just in the same room—they were in rhythm with one another. Laughing across the floor, playing their parts without stepping on each other’s toes. It felt like jazz. Spontaneous but structured. Loose but connected.
In contrast, I spend a lot of my time—with work, with content, with tools—talking to screens. Often alone. It’s easy to forget the lightness of shared space, the subtle joy of small collaboration. Team doesn’t have to mean a big organization. Sometimes it looks like making dinner together, or walking in silence with a friend, or even trading glances with a stranger on the subway—those in-between moments of unspoken human rhythm.
And there was the simplicity of the whole thing. No menu. Four pizzas. A small room with old paint and mismatched tables. Nothing curated for social media. Nothing performed. Just what it was.
I’ve come to appreciate how little it takes to create meaning. A simple ritual, repeated often, held with care. Morning tea. Evening walks. A few deep breaths before bed. When done with attention, these small gestures become more than routine—they become grounding. Like a sacred rhythm without the need for ceremony.
That pizzeria, in all its simplicity, has reframed something for me. For a long time I chased the idea that joy lay just around the bend. More time. More freedom. More clarity. It’s easy to imagine it lives elsewhere—on quiet beaches, in future plans, in someone else’s life. But it rarely arrives in the places the mind expects it to.
That night in Naples reminded me it can be right here. In work done with love. In laughter shared without reason. In something familiar done with care.
Since then, whenever I see a pizza—even a basic slice from the airport food court—I hope to smile. Not because of what it is, but because of what it represents to me. A small, grounded joy. A warmth that doesn’t demand anything. A reminder.
I take that memory as an invitation—to keep finding joy in the ordinary, and to let it spread.
And that is how I learned to pizzeria.
