@Roberta2
Hosting made me discover a lot of things about me that I didn't know at all, while I was trying desperately to learn something about it. The verb “to learn”: keep this verb in mind, because it will be the leitmotiv of these lines.
A shortlist of things that I’ve learned:
I'm much stronger than I thought;
I’m much weaker than I thought;
I have much more patience than I thought;
I have qualities that I was convinced I did not possess;
I lack qualities that I was convinced I possessed;
I'm happier now than before.
I’ve learned to laugh all over again. Some guests made me laugh and each of those laughs was a kick to fear, a kick to my limits and my inadequacies, a kick to the state of the world, and a kick to the habits of the past.
I’ve learned that hosting is much more than a comfortable bed and a hot coffee in the morning, it is understanding the essence of a country from a nuance, from a small detail that you glimpse only for an instant in a perfect stranger.
I’ve learned to appreciate the value of diversity and change that always brings something with it to put in the closet of the experience that is always too empty.
The journey with AIRBNB was hard, rough, exhilarating, painful, exciting, dark, surprising, and other adjectives that I might be forgetting, but I’m sure you've understood because hosting follows its own logic.
I’ve learned that the angles of hosting aren’t all right because hosting is imperfect, scruffy, unquantifiable, improvised, inconsistent, chaotic, casual, ambiguous, different and even filthy.
I’ve learned that hosting should never be trapped, but should be let roam free in the beautiful fields of this artificial box you call the world.
Hosting is time and life, and like all good things, it doesn't have a straight road, it brings you to some pretty unexpected places to let you see something different: every time: this a strange "game" where you do not win or lose, where you do not come in first or last.
Hosting is like love. In hosting, as in love, we grow every day.