After a week of renewal, rest, recuperation in the vast and open spaces of Maryland suburbs, I return to my home in urban Oakland. The airplane I ride on makes the five-hour flight through a changing landscape of clouds, some thick and seemingly solid, others barely a wisp in the wind. As we fly against the rotation of the earth, the daylight lingers, and the horizon changes from hazy blues and grays to crimson, fuchsia and orange.
I think to myself, flying on an airplane has got to be some completely unparalleled sort of experience when it comes to becoming suddenly aware of what time, space, and consciousness are. In the suspended space 30,000 feet above earth, it seems as though time is also held in suspension. I have always found great peace and solace on flights, receiving literal and metaphorical perspective on my life. About three-quarters of the way through the flight, I notice a tiny, black jet in the distance, floating across the sky in the opposite direction from me. There it is, nothing holding it up but air, truly flying. And that’s where I am too. Flying in the sky. Unattached to any place, unattached both to my place of departure and to my eventual point of arrival. Floating just with my thoughts and wishes for a life that seems so far away.
This trip surprised me in the amount of comfort, affirmation and support it gave me. Through seeing old friends, colleagues, professors, to waking up for days in a warm and cozy home surrounded by green space and the still-bright sun of an east coast Autumn. But it also gave me a new understanding of space, place and who I am within them. A perpetual anxiety right at the center of my chest which has been present for the past year completely disappeared when I got myself out of urbanity and spent a week sleeping and waking in a real home. Time seemed to go by with so much more leisure and ease in that country environment. As it is necessary to drive most places and nowhere of interest is really very close by, every drive is a journey of sorts, a road trip. I felt slower, softer.
As much as I enjoyed the return home, I remembered once again why in the world I had decided to pick myself up and move across the country away from all the comforts of a familiar place and old friends, to a much more urban, much more economically challenging and unpredictable city environment. As difficult as the last year has been, I needed to challenge my slowness and my softness . I wanted and needed to be in the thick of everything, lost in people of all sorts. And that same anxiety in my chest which greeted me almost immediately upon arriving at San Francisco International Airport tonight, is the same feeling that has so toughened my skin, made me speak louder and more confidently, and sharpened my gaze. It is an alchemical phenomenon – anxiety transformed into a hardened, quick, capable layer. The very way I hold myself, the integrity of my spine, has changed in tangible ways.
So to a new year, to new friends in this shifting, sometimes shady, city with whom I share my current life. I am ready for the city now, ready to take it on again.