A Still Sunday Between NYC and San Francisco

September 2, 2012.

Still Sundays

John F. Kennedy airport is still sleepy. From the speakers throughout the terminals CNN is broadcasting nothing new.  It—or whoever is in charge of this decision—has no regard for stillness, puncturing quietude in a decibel just loud enough to pierce through thoughts between dreams and coffee.

So I have had my headphones on even though I don’t want to listen to any music but the one in my head. The one made of forget-me-not moments that blossom before the sun flexes its brightness.

I just read the essay about New York City that I wrote in 2009. Then I had taken a yearlong hiatus from New York City but unlike this time it was just a pause to step away and gather perspective on this “writing thing” and live an integrated life, like water. The parts of the essay that resonate most now are towards the very end:

New York City impels us to recognize that what’s most complex about life—changes—is indeed what gives life value. It is these transitory opportunities embedded in the windows of refinement that allow one to create, interact, and evolve. This is what attracts new bodies from world over each day to New York City. This is probably also one of the reasons my parents’ relationship is enviable to many who meet them: it is and is not what it once was.

I will never forget my first night alone in NYC: midst the anxiety, hope, chaos, stillness, joy, aloneness, and a plethora of other emotions—there were two sentiments which I never entertained: doubt and regret. I was just where I wanted to be and beneath the canopy of clammy uncertainty that humid June night, there was also an inner peace and security.

In the end perhaps it matters not where one ends up counting life’s paradoxes—a farm in a small town in California where my parents live or the The Big Apple—but what matters is with whom you participate in an ever lasting opportunity to grow presented through the chasm of oppositional forces that govern existence and love.

Yesterday night I spent my last night in my apartment, my home for nine years, with the same sense of confidence and ease. I felt very aligned with the momentum and direction of the Universe and my decision to leave New York City.

I don’t have anything profound to say about my so perceived “epic” move from my beloved New York City to California. It was time.

It’s really simple to me and to anyone else who understands energy.

New York City is an energy. She is a fusion of ideas and possibilities that have no comparison. New York City, like life, simply goes on. Once you are part of it, you can experience it anywhere.

If I said I was doing this because my significant other and I wanted to start a family it would be perfectly commonsensical. Or if I mentioned space. Or job. Or if I mentioned anything other than what I have: it was just time. Don’t you listen to Time?

I had great space although I had outgrown the neighborhood. Although it will certainly be convenient to finally be closer to my family I had been operating back and forth from where ever I had been for so long that it had become second nature. Work opportunities for the kind of work I was interested in which allowed for writing, writing, writing were the only driving forces in my decision after decoding that I was running against the grain of energy upon which New York City runs. I was no longer on the same frequency as the very energy that fed me some of the grandest experiences in my personal development.

During the move some stranger—the person who bought the recliner? USPS teller? A waiter?—said to me, “People either get tired of trying to become rich in New York City or they get tired of being broke. Either way a time comes when enough is enough. And if you have some options you should explore them.”

During the last three weeks I have been surprised to learn that there are so many people who continue to live in New York City despite their desire to leave no different than someone living in a very small town with limited options. I lived in New York City as long as I lived because I didn’t want to be anywhere else.

I thought about it. I didn’t move to New York City to become rich and only since I began writing full time did I experience fatigue from trying to keep finances in order so as to be able to keep writing. Before writing I was okay with “just good enough” consumption just like everyone else. Writing or any other creative endeavor demands immense discipline, one beyond a Sunday compulsion, and discipline seeks integration.

What was available to me in New York City when I would come up for air after being under writing wasn’t nourishing other than a handful of very close friends (despite the many people I know), my homeless stranger friends and Marco Rojas’ yoga classes.  It was time and it made sense. It helps that I am very close to my family and enjoy their company and will be in close proximity to them due to this decision.

I just see this move as an inevitability borne out of a natural progression much in part to integration.

How many months before the word “integration” is hijacked by conventional comprehension like the word “authenticity”?

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You can’t mimic another individual’s writing voice so as to express your relationship or understanding with Time.  Just don’t do it. It sounds trite. If still finding your “voice” then emulate the works of those you respect and admire for as long as you need to but not when it comes to the subjects of Time, Nature, Stillness, Death, and Love. In these matters be where you are and come to them again and again till you find the reigns of some universal Truth in your own voice. Let the experience of how little you understand and how simply you articulate guide the chariot of your voice.

Men and women in relatively functional relationships who continue to create circumstances where they can feel the assurance of being desired sexually are nothing more than sex organs in the gamut of human evolution. How inadequate and stunted.

Some people keep certain people in their lives as “friends” because these friends remind them how far up he or she has jumped from the trampoline made of the past that wasn’t going anywhere. Perhaps they are afraid of returning to a previous self without another serving as a reminder what not to do or how to be. I am unable to relate to those who hold on to all the selves one no longer is. I have nostalgia for places but not the self that has died. Moving forward just comes naturally to me perhaps. Or perhaps it really is through my yoga practice where I am forced to accept that we die a little every day—if we are growing. Some days I accept this with better ease than other days when the body is resistant to change.

This is precisely why I must write fiction. Without the characters that have offered me the above insights who am I to make the aforementioned claims?

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I have been writing most of this Sunday on a plane. A lady named Jane Scharfman is seated next to me and inquired if I was an actress and so we began a small conversation about New York City and acting. She had bought the Sunday edition of New York Times for the first time in a long time. “$5.00! Can you believe this nonsense? That’s a bagel and coffee.”

We talked about New York because now I know why people from New York talk about New York. It’s just reminiscing about an idea that does and does not exist. Kind of like the meaning of life, there is and isn’t one.

She is going to San Francisco for a seniors’ comedy workshop. She says, “Seniors should practice sit down comedy because stand up is too hard for us.” It made me smile. She is charming.  “That’s easy when one is around the right people,” she says.

She is strong. “Well, of course I am strong. I challenge myself.”

She started late in life:  “I began my business at 47. It became a huge success. It is never too late to start over or hell in my case start for the first time. Comfort is doing what you want to do when you want to do it. That’s rich. Going to Saks to buy stuff is easy if you have money. Most people with a lot of money don’t have the comfort of time to do what they really want to do. Now don’t get me wrong, I like very nice things too.”

She tells me more,  “Between my first marriage of fifteen years and a few long affairs in between I finally really fell in love at 60. I think no one should get married before 60.” This makes me laugh out loud.

She is 75 and doesn’t understand why people can’t understand her desire and investment to renovate her kitchen. “Sure I don’t like to cook but I still get my legs waxed and I have been single ever since my partner passed on. What does one have to do with the other?”

I tell her she is funny. She says, “I can be miserable too. It’s a choice.”

There are many other things she tells me. But I will save those for fiction.

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“The Buddha says you are a Buddha. All you have to do is wake up.”

That’s what Marco Rojas says during classes just as our attachment to identities is about to get expunged from our cytoplasm so we are closer to the nucleus in every cell. I wish this could happen without work but apparently you have to work for it. Very hard. Conscious effort that sometimes looks sweaty.

“You are New York,” I have been told on more than one occasion.

No.

I, you, and each one of us, is much, much, much bigger than any place that wants to claim our identity.

Freedom.

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Time for a nap.

I forgot that flights to San Francisco are longer than to Los Angeles. I heard that the San Francisco airport offers a yoga studio! I can finally stretch my back in public without looking like an odd flamingo. The lay over ought to allow time for that. Stretching that is. Not looking like a disproportionate flamingo.

Stillness travels everywhere.

~a.q.s.

Related posts:

A Still Sunday, particularly today. Lotus Sunday A Still Sunday Night