Reflections on Moving

It’s not news to those close to me (or to anyone who pays attention to my tweets), but I’m moving—to NYC!

Burlington, Vermont has been my home for over six years. It’s the longest I’ve lived in a single place since graduating from college. I love it here! My neighbors on the block greet me by name. The people are incredibly kind and friendly. It’s beautiful and walkable. There are discernible seasons. The great Lake Champlain, steadfast witness and beholder of much of my growth and pain, is a pleasant ten-minute saunter away from my apartment.

Yet, I feel ready for something different. I want to be surrounded by more than undergrads and a handful of families. I want a bit more drama and social interestingness (just a wee bit). I want to be thrown in the city of cities and to find more of my people.

At least that’s what I tell myself. In truth it’s not totally clear what my motivations are. I parrot the above reasons to anyone who asks, but they are hardly more than flimsy mappings of amorphous intuitions. What will I be doing? Who arethe people I’m looking for? I don’t quite know yet, and that’s fine.

I tend to want to feel perfectly aligned with my choices before making any big decisions. Any inkling of fear, doubt, or discomfort means that I should introspect more until everything is settled. Yet it’s rarely the case that we ever reach this state prior to taking the leap. Nor do we need to in order to live well.

Before I considered moving, I sensed that something needed to change in the way that I lived. I had an abundance of freedom and flexibility with my job, leaving me plenty of time to indulge in my personal projects. So I read and wrote. I sang and played guitar. I lounged around dreamily in coffee shops. It was everything I wanted.

And then it wasn’t. It got stale and meaningless really quickly. I wondered if I needed deeper friendships or work that was more challenging. I then started hosting the occasional gathering and introduced many of my friends to one another. I participated more frequently in various online and offline groups. I also traveled more.

From Portland, Oregon to Asheville, North Carolina; from SF to NYC—every place I visited affected me differently. A small handful inspired a sense of magic that I felt had been absent, while others felt like more of the same. What I hadn’t realized that I could feel so different, be so different until I had a change of scenery.

This shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did. I’d spent so long in a single place engaged in a world of my own—a world mostly consisting of text, abstractions, and daydreams—that a basic fact of selfhood had been forgotten. I needed others, and I wanted to participate more fully in the world. My lease renewal was coming up, and I asked myself if I wanted to live here for another year. That’s when NYC became a real possibility.

I’d thought about moving to NYC before, but it always seemed like a fantasy I didn’t actually want. My visits were always inspiring and magical, but also draining and excessive. It felt like a place for brilliants and creatives to light both ends of midnight candle until they burned out and moved elsewhere, not somewhere that people lived. My fears spoke to me loud and clearly: I could never make it in the city. It only allowed entry to those who wanted it badly enough.

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Still, I kept meeting people who consistently encouraged me and made me feel like I belonged. People from my Twitter circle. People from my online meditation community. People from the Interintellect. Everyone I knew and talked to thought it was a good idea. The only thing holding me back, it seemed, was a fear of not being good-smart-interesting enough; that I didn’t have the drive or energy to be a “real” New Yorker.

I also feared not being able to find what Vermont has given me. Here I can walk for miles along the nearby lake with a deep loneliness in my heart, only to later discover that solitude has decided to accompany me on the way back home. From Erazim Kohák’s The Embers and the Stars:

Loneliness is the condition of feeling abandoned amid an alien world, cut off from communication. Solitude is the condition of being alone in the presence of a living, familiar world, willing to listen to it, to see and to understand it in Einfühlung and Eindeutung, sharing in its feel and meaning.

What follows is a sense of reconnection, my pain being held and absorbed by what Kohák calls “the moral sense of nature.” These moments feel like grace in the truest sense of the word, like something you completely surrender to when you understand you are in the presence of something sacred.

I am afraid of losing this, of drowning in the excess of human constructs and artifacts without a hand to reach for. I’m scared I won’t be able to keep up with the pace that the action demands. Though a friend who has lived there likes to remind me that NYC has everything for everyone, even the grace of solitude. Kohák again:

It is not a matter of “learning to live without others,” but rather of learning to live with nature andothers, not outshouting them with our insistent presence, but being instead ready to see and hear, in love and respect. For, in understanding as in sense perception, it is when we stop speaking that we begin to hear; when we stop staring, things emerge before our eyes; when we stop insisting on our explanations, we can begin to understand.

Portland, Oregon was the other place I considered. I really liked it there, how it felt like a bigger version of Burlington with its balance of city and lush landscapes. It’s closer to my parents and family too, as well as the university where I work. There’s something peaceful about it. And yet…

NYC is a city that evokes a certain kind of doubt, the kind of doubt that springs from an undefinable but obvious love. There are too many people! And yet… The rent’s too expensive! And yet… There aren’t enough trees! And yet… I’m over romanticizing a bit, but that’s exactly what’s so alluring about the city. It welcomes romantics and dreamers like me into its all-consuming arms. I want to find out what will emerge on the other side.

The magic of NYC is undeniable. I was virtually assaulted by images, ideas, and lines of poetry the last time I was there, all within the span of a five minute walk somewhere in the Upper West Side. It was a beautiful, dizzying dance between my mind, my heart, and the city. I want to understand what it’s all about in the deepest sense, with the hope that some of it will rub off on me.

All my previous moves were for employment reasons. Even where I went to school for my undergraduate and graduate degrees was constrained by circumstance. That’s why this move feels so big. It clearly embodies the fact that I have total responsibility over the rest of my life. The guard rails of pre-defined paths have disappeared, as has the voice of convention. No one can save me from myself. It’s scary, yes, but also wildly life-affirming.

To move is to learn to trust the world in motion, to allow ourselves to be guided by the rich, vivid texture of experience rather than our out dated projections. I can study the map of a place all day. I can even visit and obtain a cardiogram of its heartbeat. But to live there, to be part of a place, to contribute to its ongoing arrhythmia, that is something else entirely. That requires a leap of faith, a level of commitment that takes you beyond what anyone of us can ever predict.