Tag Archives: New York City

On My Mind

(Dis)connection

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I’ve been at a loss for words lately. I’ve been doing a lot of writing but abandoning drafts half formed, a lot of thinking but letting the thoughts go before uncovering them, playing with them, sharing them. I finished three (or was it four?) books this week, hoping their words would color the ideas I can’t seem to articulate.

A total sense of detachment from my own thoughts is strange. It’s like I’m watching myself try to figure out what I want to say and how I want to say it, staring out the windows of this café, half-noticing the people walking across the street. My own thoughts float lazily back to me, reminders that they’re there if I want to find them, introduce them to each other, engage with whatever is tugging at the back of my mind.

I’m an observer to my own mind. I’m lucid dreaming while awake.

On the surface, I’m preoccupied with a field trip, modified school schedules, papers to grade, end-of-year projects to implement. I can’t stop reading about healthcare and I can’t shake a deep sense of insecurity that I can’t quite place.

Oddly, however, discounting the healthcare travesty for the moment, it’s been a truly wonderful week. School was busy and productive and I laughed a lot. There was also a lot of socializing, which, while typical of my life in general, has not been typical of my life in New York. As usual when things happen, everything is happening all at once.

And that leaves me nostalgic.

I’m moving again over the summer (details on that after three more pieces of paper are finalized and signed) and that means starting over. When I know I’m about to say goodbye, I grow reluctant to do it. I grow more forgiving of the irritations and inconveniences I encounter, and begin to see them as endearing idiosyncrasies rather than sources of frustrations. I become aware of opportunities I haven’t taken, people I haven’t truly gotten to know, foods I haven’t tried, neighborhoods I haven’t explored, music I haven’t heard, sights I haven’t seen. As I make preparations to move for the fourth time in as many years, I begin to drag my feet, making mental (and sometimes physical) notes of what I’ll miss.

It’s never easy to leave.

And sometimes, it’s equally difficult to go.

I’ve learned that there’s a difference between leaving and going. The former means packing a life into boxes, hugging the people who have gone from being strangers to being friends, leaving the keys on the table, and waving goodbye. It’s a deliberate decision to stop turning back. It’s an exhale, a sigh, a conclusion. The latter is the first step forward, checking the time and setting the GPS, or handing over a passport to gate agents. It’s about deciding to take a chance, a gamble, a deep inhale. In going somewhere new, you’re supposed to be ready for anything. Otherwise, why go?

I didn’t do any of that when I moved to New York. I turned around in Singapore’s Changi Airport one more time after clearing passport control, and that was when I knew I was heading down a road leading to a very different future than the one I hadn’t admitted I was hoping for.

My mind has been spinning at night, which is apparent when I wake up before my alarm, when I look at my watch at the end of a run, when my dreams are fragments of conversations not had. I’m floating in between a life I might have had and a life I hope to have. Maybe you just weren’t ready, a friend suggested yesterday. I think she’s right.

What if I’m never ready? What if, now that I know what I’m looking for (including, not limited to, and largely involving authentic connection and collaboration with those around me) and what I want to do (change the world), none of it ever comes to fruition?

That’s the big step forward I mentioned earlier. It’s admitting what I’m looking for and want to do and committing to that. It’s dedicating my actions, relationships, and career to those things rather than trying to figure out what those things are. And it’s daunting because failure, readjustment, modification, and heartbreak are all likely along the road ahead.

But so are success, achievement, happiness, and love.

Because that’s what living means. As it has been. As it will be.

There’s no stopping in place because places don’t stop. There’s no turning back time because time can’t turn. There are no crystal balls, nothing foretold, foreknown, or predetermined. There are roads, as Dante and Frost said, and some roads are less traveled.

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New York

Free Hugs

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A few days ago, I was walking through Union Square and saw a cluster of people (two men, two women, multiple races, 20s or 30s) holding signs that said “FREE HUGS” in large, colorful letters.

Before even actively thinking about it, I knew I was heading straight for the people with the signs.

I walked towards a man with a bushy brown beard who asked, “Need a hug?”

I made a sound that was somewhere between an embarrassed chuckle and a nervous giggle and replied, “Yeah.” (Truth be told, I can really always use a hug.)

We hugged, I thanked him and wished him a great day, and he sent me on my way with a sticker.

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Pretty good advice! Though not so secret if now printed on stickers.
Of course, I thought, noting the URL in tiny letters. Does anything simply come from the goodness of the heart? But then I looked up LightSourceTemple.org. If you’ve clicked on the link, you’ll notice what I noticed – the domain has expired. LightSourceTemple.org doesn’t exist.

So why give out free hugs? For a laugh? For fun? A dare? A cult initiation? Or because the world can be really hard and sometimes people just need hugs?

While I can’t answer what those four people in Union Square were aiming for, I can explain why I not only accepted the free hug, but also wanted it.

I believe very strongly that there is a lack of physical human connection in our society.

I’ve thought about this a lot but it struck me anew when I was recently in Israel with our eighth graders. After just a day away from school, in a completely different environment, open affection was acceptable and the norm. Even more illuminating, much of this behavior came from the Israeli staff who we met on the first day of our trip. It was perfectly fine to drape an arm over a colleague’s shoulder for no apparent reason. It was fine to say good morning with a kiss on the cheek. A touch to someone’s back was simply a way of saying hello.

We don’t do enough of that in the US.

While in Israel, I read Dacher Keltner’s Born to Be Good, which contains chapters on smile, laughter, touch, and love, among other things. He writes about oxytocin and its effects on our behavior, attitudes, and relationships. Humans need positive physical contact in order to bond, trust others, and feel happy. In more than one place in his book, Keltner blames the Puritans for the lack of lack of physical touch in American culture.

I mentioned the book during a conversation just before walking through Union Square and seeing the free hugs signs. A friend was talking about his frustration with the repressive nature of American society and how we don’t really permit deviating from the prescribed course of action (school, more school, job) to allow for authentic personal growth or exploration. Thinking of Keltner, I suggested use of the word “Puritanical” to describe typical American attitudes towards uncharted paths and lack of conformity to the few molds we have deemed acceptable.

All of this was on my mind when I walked through Union Square a couple days ago. Though the free hugs people don’t know it, they appeared with their signs at just the right time for me to say yes to their hug.

As a rule, I try to be as open with and responsive to others as I can. Accepting and being truly delighted by the free hug was just another way of trying to form a connection, however brief, with someone who was willing to be open, responsive, and vulnerable to those around him. Back in February, I sat down to talk to three men on a bench in Central Park for the same reason. When a college student who started a conversation with me at a nail salon last week asked if she could interview me for a school project, I gave her my phone number with true pleasure. I’m trying to make the world better, one positive interaction at a time.

We are all humans. Whether we like it or not, we are all in this together. If we can’t reach out and touch one another, what’s the point in living at all?

New York

A Night at the Opera

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Without music, life would be a mistake. – Friedrich Nietzsche

The first image that comes to mind when I think “opera” is a scene in Anastasia, the animated film that came out in 1997. Anastasia gets all dressed up in pearls and a floor-length gown and watches the opera from a luxury box through a pair of gold binoculars. Since then, opera has meant elegance, finery, glamor, culture.

On Thursday, a colleague took me to the Met for a performance of Beethoven’s only opera, Fidelio. While it didn’t involve a floor-length gown or gold binoculars, it was absolutely stunning and also changed my schema of opera.

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My coworker neglected to mention that her season tickets are in the front row. This gave me a view of the orchestra that I’ve never had, which was fascinating in itself. During intermission, for example, the musicians chatted to each other, took pictures, sent text messages, and suddenly became regular people. Other than a few small live music venues, I’ve never been close enough to a stage to watch orchestral musicians perform. To say that music is alive is to underestimate the role of the people who bring it to life.

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I grew up listening to many of the Classical Kids cassette tapes – Beethoven Lives Upstairs, Mozart’s Magic Fantasy, Vivaldi’s Ring of Mystery, Tchaikovsky Discovers America, Mr. Bach Comes to Call were often our choice of car music. (Barenaked Ladies and Smash Mouth took over for a while after that, but I think we had CDs by then.) As soon as the Fidelio overture began, it was like being at a Beethoven concert. My knowledge of music theory is unfortunately limited and I can’t actually describe what “being at a Beethoven concert” sounds like, but I recognized him immediately.

The singers, of course, were equally amazing. Their voices were so big and so full of every emotion, making them instantly relatable and making the story easy to follow. I likely had a huge smile on my face the whole time. Live performance always has that impact on me.

Overall, the opera was far more approachable than I had expected. On the back of each seat is a small screen that you can choose to turn on to view the subtitles for everything being sung onstage. For Fidelio, the available languages were German (the language of the opera), English, and Spanish. The words are red on black screens that are constructed in such a way that it is very difficult to see the screen of the people next to you. Having the captions on is not at all distracting while also allowing the audience to  follow tradition and watch the opera without translation.

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There was something in Fidelio for everyone – unrequited love, ambition, crime, marital fidelity, revolutionary undertones. Opera is definitely an experience that I want to have again, which is feasible considering tickets at the Met start at about $30 for the highest section in the auditorium. Again, approachable. Who knew?

In addition to the opera, I was really interested in the audience. My coworker had told me to expect everything from tuxedos with tails to jeans and backpacks. She was not exaggerating. I saw multiple people who were clearly tourists and backpackers in the city for a few days, and multiple people who have clearly attended opera for decades and embrace all the glamor that opera has always had. My favorite by far was a couple in our row who were well into their advanced years and epitomized fabulous. He sported a tuxedo with a patterned cummerbund matching his bowtie and pocket square, and she wore a velvet pantsuit with a spangly rhinestone front and no back with a white feathered fedora. They were beautiful.

As far as cultural experiences go, I’m trying to do as much as I can for my time here in New York. I’ve been to live music venues, Broadway shows, comedy clubs, and now the opera. I haven’t seen a dance performance here so that’s next on the list.

Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent. – Victor Hugo