#9: On Looking Around
March 11, 2024
Cambridge
Fred again..–Tiny Desk Concert
It was an ordinary day. I was a little sleepy, a little lazy, a little anxious. The sky was grey so everything was grey. It was drizzling. Being outside gave me a chill.
One afternoon last week, I walked home up a small street. To my right was a small home-goods store, to my left an elementary school playground. Walking gave my thoughts a pleasant rhythm. I picked up my head a little and allowed my gaze to widen, taking in the entire scene—laundromat, goth teens petting a cat on the corner, kids at recess, cars in a hurry to get somewhere.
I thought about Paris. I’m flying there later today. I thought about the warm light and the cold darkness in Edouard Cortes’s paintings of its shops and signs and alleys. I imagined breathing in that beauty, absorbing it through my skin and recording it in my memory.
I walk down that plain street every day on the way to or from school. I never notice its charms. Now, I picture a man doing the same thing on a street in Paris, anxious and preoccupied and barely there. I want to shake him and say look! like I would if a shooting star appeared in a night sky or a rare bird alighted in a tree.
But his distraction has its reasons, as does mine. I forgive that his mind is elsewhere when it could be in Paris, and I forgive that I am elsewhere when I could be here, now. All of us are adrift in the flow of time. What we have to finish in a day would take a lifetime to get right; what we feel in a day would take a lifetime to understand. The mistakes and missed chances pile and pile. We’re doing the best we can.
Being alive is hard. We reprise the daily chores and maintain the to-do list; we fear, we grieve, we wonder. There’s never time or space to look around, so we look forward to some future Paris. But like it or not, it’s been all around us, always, that distant life we long for. Vivid, colorful, tasty, indulgent, disorienting, melancholy. In the end full and wistful. So obviously worth it.