see as i saw

One year ago on this date, I walked away from predictable and comfortable for an unplanned period of time.  I've spent much of the past few weeks having those vivid reels of memory play through my mind.  Mostly I flash back to Costa Rica.  I relive scenery and conversations: glimpses of sunrise walks on the beach and rainforest canopies, soundbites of choppy Spanish conversation and Pacific waves.  It's an involuntary but unstoppable brain activity imbued with a sense of fondness and longing.

I've spent a lot of hours pondering 'happiness' - discussing, reading, thinking.  What I've come to conclude is that I can't think of happiness as an aggregate.  So what exactly does that mean?  There's no such thing as the perfect alignment of all circumstances and situations.  This isn't Pleasantville.  Life doesn't fit in a box.  If we expect to attain perfection across all of life's myriad segments (career, home, love, family, etc.) at once, then we've only set ourselves up for a fall.

Looking at it from another angle, we also can't expect to believe that a single decision we make right now will remain the unaltered solution in the long term.  By nature, our needs and ideals shift and change.  So you can't ask yourself, "What will make me happy forever?"  Odds are, there isn't an answer.  I'm no longer even willing to ask myself, "What will make me happy a year from now?".  Because, honestly, one year ago I wouldn't have had a clue about my life course in January 2013.  I actually didn't even want to have a clue.  And I'm remembering how that lack of pressure felt so freeing.

This doesn't mean I'm going to stop striving toward certain goals.  But much like my 2013 goal planning, allowing myself to shift focus if one goal feels out of sync, I want to keep my life decisions malleable.  I want happiness to mean that I'm content with what I'm doing in the present.  And if I'm not, that I'm exploring ways to redirect myself.  This could be as high level as a job or living situation, or as rudimentary as being bored on a Saturday afternoon.

One other thought, snagged from a blog that I follow, that keeps running through my head:

"I realised it was never about what I wanted to do, but about how I wanted to feel."

Yes, Chicago, despite your wintry gray skies and freezing temperatures, I love you.  Despite that, I'm leaving you tomorrow.  To cheat on you with a city that many consider more prestigious.  We'll only be together for three days, so I hope you'll accept me back with open arms.

So I'm off to New York City tomorrow, before dawn even cracks, to visit the mother ship and add a few more tricks to my professional arsenal.  I found myself wondering if the streets of New York still have a constant odor of trash in the winter (I've only been there in August or September).  And for some reason I found myself feeling like I should set aside some time to peruse some of the iconic festive sights.

It's funny, because in Chicago I steer clear of the festive areas, clogged with tourists.  Of course, I've seen them all before, too.  No reason to subject myself to pandemonium when there's nothing new within it.  And after musing about the possible wintry smell of NYC, I walked outside into the Chicago twilight and it smelled like chocolate chip cookies.  It's one of those little things about the city that makes me smile.

And it sort of makes me think, for just a nanosecond, that the streets are going to start flowing with chocolate and my life will transform into a Willy Wonka movie.  Of course, there's always the dirty wet dog smell to convince me otherwise.  After four years, I'm pretty convinced that it tends to waft around the city on days with a combined high humidity and pollution level.

For the past day and a half, I've been ruminating on a mantra that my Saturday morning yoga instructor introduced to us.  It's a Sanskrit word: swaha.  As soon as she began describing its meaning, I wondered how she had dug inside of my head.  After class, I did a little more digging on its origins.

I cut and pasted together an essential meaning that makes sense to me: uplifting oneself by surrendering the ego and releasing it into the fire.  'Swaha' is a mantra, which makes it akin to a mental action, a keyword to remind you to engage.

Too often, I take offense or get overwrought worrying about what other people say to me or think about me.  I get caught up in how inappropriately people act or treat myself and others.  But I can't control other people, I can only control how I react and think about them.

The first part of this equation is something I've thought about and focused on before.  In fact, it's likely contained in another one of these 322 posts.  To some measure, I've managed to rein in my reactionary tendencies, whether that means an external or internal reaction.

But just because I've averted the negative flow of emotion, it doesn't mean I've taken my ego out of it.  I'm still likely to let a single instance of someone else's action or opinions affect me - whether it's my view of them or myself.  So although I began teaching myself how to quell the reaction, the effects still linger.

I seem to be going through a period right now where it feels like I'm struggling to keep a lot of balls in the air.  So it's easy to get down on myself.  'Swaha' may be just a word, but it's a simpler way of reminding myself to remove my ego from an event and relinquish it, forget about it, let it cease to exist.  And with that, perhaps it won't be the end of my struggling, but at least I can hope that it'll help keep me mentally afloat.

It's still a little strange for me to be this open about the things swirling in my head.  I suppose there's a certain sense of invisibility about digital communication, allowing me to feel like I'm writing to no one.  And there's also a little bit of that removal of ego that I've learned to embrace this year.

It's difficult to believe, as I sit on my own couch for the first time in two weeks, that merely five hours ago I was in New York.  As my time wound down, clearly there was no way that I had seen all of the city.  So, Sunday was devoted to a single priority, the Brooklyn Bridge.  Anything else that I fit in would be bonus...I ended up with a lot of bonuses.

First of all, I started my morning with a battle of the bagels.  Yesterday's H&H Bagel versus today's Brooklyn Bagel.  H&H hands down, in case you happen to be in NYC bagel hunting.  I hopped a C train to Brooklyn, leisurely ate a bagel the size of my head on a quiet park bench (you can find those in Brooklyn, I guess), then strolled across the Brooklyn Bridge.
The city views are great, the structure of the bridge itself is amazing, and starting the walk from Brooklyn was genius.  It wasn't until I was nearly into Manhattan again that the glut of tourists was upon me.  By then, I was already done and moving on.

Then it was time to do what I do best, wander.  This is where the bonuses racked up.  I quickly threaded through lower Manhattan, passing the World Trade Center area (obviously packed with tourists) and the financial district (heavily secured, thanks to Occupy).  A mile up Broadway brought me to Canal Street/Chinatown and enterprising folks trying to entice you to follow them for a selection of "Prada, Louis, Gucci".  Not my scene, moving on.

As it happened, the entirety of Little Italy was a giant street festival.  I inched up five blocks, single file, with cannolis, pizzas, and assorted meats staring me in the face.  Tempting, but overwhelming. It felt like time for some R&R and people watching.  Another mile, through SoHo, brought me to Washington Square.
Somehow I managed to get entrenched in an hour and half conversation with the guy on the bench next to me.  It all began when he, a New Yorker, mistakenly assumed me to be a New Yorker as well.  Assimilation took less than two weeks.  From there, we discussed the obvious: college, sports, jobs, favorite places in the city.  And then things got delightfully pretentious, debating the value and classification of modern art.  You know the merits of Renoir versus Pollock, how people mistakenly find Degas' ballerinas beautiful, the richness of the colors in a Seurat.

Alas, it was time to return to the Holiday Inn and retrieve my bags.  The Windy City was calling.  I'm glad to be here, excited to return to life in the Loop tomorrow.  My morning crossover from Brooklyn and my afternoon in Washington Square created a perfect end cap to my NYC adventure though.  (I swear posts will get shorter again as I return to my standard life.)