Times they are a-changin'

I think the last of the snow has fallen on Manhattan. The season is ending and people will stop talking now about the snow and the cold and start talking about how the temperature is rising more and more, how soon summer will be here and we’ll all be feeling a lot better to be outside, to be walking around this city and not trapped indoors, in our tall and small apartment buildings piled one on top of one wishing we could open our windows and make the city our back porches.

It happens quickly and the pulse of the place changes, and maybe then when the weather gets warmer I won’t feel so much like all I want to do is simply disappear. Because it’s like the more you dig your hands into your pockets the more everything catches up to you. It’s easy, with your hands reaching for warmth to look at your life and think you’ve got it all wrong, like you should be in some beach house on the water because life’s just too short not to.

Because from street to street you just think - if only I could just go somewhere else and meet new people, things would be better. If only I could just skip town and go somewhere warm, somewhere new, somewhere where nobody knows my name or my past or my face, I could be happy.

Being in a city surrounded by so many people sometimes all you want to do is just disappear, go somewhere where you don’t have to fight to push past them on the sidewalk, those people who always stand in the middle talking, the women with strollers, the tourists with cameras. If only you could just go somewhere where you felt like you could breathe more, and start over and create a new past in those moments when all you want to do is forget the one you already have.

You think that if only you could go somewhere where you wouldn’t be so afraid of what you wanted, where you’d have the space and time to figure it out, you’d get through the rough patches where nothing makes sense, where your life just feels like these endless passing weeks of sameness, of people on sidewalks and in subways and in elevators all trying to get somewhere else all the time, and you – you feeling like you’re stuck in the middle of this moving mass without a clear destination at all.

But you keep on, you keep on hopping over snow banks on street corners, and digging your hands deeper into your pockets to find warmth as you walk from block to block, giving up on pushing past people and letting your own pace sink in, letting yourself take the time to live more deliberately, because you know it won’t be lasting much longer.

And you realize that your past isn’t yours anymore anyway because everything has changed, and no matter how much you may want to you can’t get it back, and as unclear as the future is, as monotonous and unsure as it may look from here, from your vantage point of hopping over snow banks on street corners, you have no choice but to venture into it. Because If Only is always just If Only if you want to live more deliberately.

The city, like life, waits for no one. So you have to believe in it, even when you want to give up, because if you keep living your life on If Onlys you may never be able to catch up with it.