moments we live together
community is a stage on which we are all actors
Good morning and Happy Sunday to those who practice –
Today I am traveling across the North American continent to Vancouver for a work trip, so the past few days at home in New York have included the usual smorgasbord of preparative activities amidst the usual homesickness for a home I haven’t even left yet.
There’s likely some truth to the idea that preparing to leave—a home, something, someone—often produces a more emotionally heightened state than the act of leaving itself. One of the seemingly most beautiful things about the emotions of home is not the sadness of its goodbye nor the joy of its return, but the emotional delta between these two states. How fortunate we are to be able to expand our capacity to feel as a result of our relationship to our home.
The last few days at home--in the northern pocket of Battery Park, a leafy, quiet and affluent pocket of young professionals and their families peacefully living together just west of Tribeca on the bank of the lower Hudson River—seem to confirm this idea. Everything looks beautiful (especially the leaves). And everything feels beautiful. There’s a warm current of magic in the air, a full-bodied magic that sends a tingle down the crease of the back and out through the pads of the finger tips.
Amidst my pre-trip errands the past few days, I’ve spent time asking the question: why is this warm current of magic in the air? What makes this neighborhood so special? Why Battery Park? And why am I homesick for it when I haven’t even yet left?
In search of an answer, I rifled through my memory and returned to the moments that set our home aglow with energy this week:
On Monday morning: before sunrise during one of the darkest stretches of mornings all year (before the clocks turn back) parents were standing together on our street corner, socializing in tied bathroom robes and holding coffee mugs of all shapes and sizes, seeing their children off toward the stairs of a big yellow idling school bus. Some kids were easy send offs, others had clear separation anxiety from mom and dad. Some parents were present, others necessarily multi-tasking as their dogs took a shit. I think one parent even went full Marilyn Monroe and took to smoking a morning cigarette in her robe, standing tall as if she were a proud renegade defying domesticity. Thankfully her daughter was already on the bus. Amidst this darkness it could have been easy to miss the macro significance, or meaning, in this micro moment: Elders sending the children off to learn, wading through the mundane, routine motions of life, in service of a magnificent altruism: future-proofing the next generation of the human race forward into the future via a daily send off into an education.
On Halloween night: A group of at least 8-10 young kids, clearly already buzzed from Snickers and Almond Joys, in the elevator of our building this week dressed as the Pokemon icons Pikka Chu and Charizard. It must have taken the elevator 20 mins to reach the ground floor as the Nth Pokemon-covered-critter entered the increasingly full elevator with each lowering floor. If we were breaking a fire code with this many Pikka Chus in one elevator, the kids wouldn’t have known nor cared. They were too busy frenetically OOing and AWing over each’s others personal rendition of the costume and inadvertently swatting one another with their costume tails. A swatting tail caught my arm—incidental contact--and it instantly became a highlight of my week. The other parents in the elevator car also took the frenzy of tail swats to their torsos and legs in good natured stride. We were all momentarily united in our collective tolerance of horseplay in the elevator. None of us would have had it any other way. How fun for the kids to be able to step into the characters of their imaginations for a night. How fun for all of us to co-participate in a moment of silly joy in the elevator. How could we not smile and laugh together?
All week long: one of our newer doormen, a full-faced and jolly African-American man with a round belly and an earnest smile, has been extending gracious two-handed handshakes to the parents and playful knuckle pounds to the kids as he holds the door for them in and out of the building, grinning from cheek-to-cheek all the while as he meets them for the first time. Unapologetically caught between a kid and an adult, I of course choose the knuckle pound in lieu of a handshake. Our knuckles collided effortlessly that first time, with enough arm enthusiasm to amplify the theatrics of the gesture but gentle enough upon knuckle-to-knuckle contact to avoid hurting each other’s hand. His knuckle pounds with the incoming and outgoing neighbors seemed to make his day and they certainly made mine. That first time we gave each other the knuckles, it felt like we had been sharing this moment all our lives.
Thursday evening: I and an oncoming passerby could not get out of each other’s way. She moved left right as I did. We both then shifted back to the right together in the very next moment, and then, both of us at this point being somewhat self-aware of the haphazard entente, re-directed back to the left once more and at last bumped into each other. Arrested by the moment, we both stood still in our tracks, smiled, laughed, until one of us jokingly gave the other a wide berth—like a zoologist giving plenty of space to a hungry rhino--as we finally passed one another and kept on with our lives. How enlivening to realize in this moment, the paths of two lives, quite literally, collided. Imagine the odds.
Saturday morning: I had a fantastic moment of commiseration about the unseasonably hot November days with a DoorDash delivery man. A younger man, surely from North Africa or the Middle East, with a seasoned and weathered face, he wore a bright all-red delivery jacket that made him look like a hybrid between an upscale ski instructor and an event security organizer. I asked him if he was hot in “that thing”, to which he quickly quipped in return “I sure am, but hey it makes for a great sweaty workout”. I laughed. We’re not that different after all, are we? None of us are when we take out our AirPods, keep the phones in our pockets and interact with one another in this physical world instead of verbally flogging each other in the digital one. In our brief moment together, one unlikely to ever happen again in the future, an easy friendliness and an open sense of humor easily transcended our differences. Race, class, age. All of these identity labels fell by the wayside. Fog cleared, revealing a bridge. When we burn off all the fog of differences, the sun shines through and reminds us we are the same.
As you’re reading this, you’re perhaps drawing parallels to moments like these in your week, in your local communities, in your everyday lives. And for me, in this moment as I simultaneously write and reflect on the week that passed, that is exactly the punchline: these moments of magic, moments of connection, are everywhere in our lives.
None of these moments was/is proprietary to Battery Park, or any neighborhood in the United States, or any neighborhood around the world. Putting jokes aside about how positively wonderful I believe Battery Park and its community of citizens to be, there are earnest and open and caring people sprinkled through every community, big and small, on the entire face of this magnificent planet.
Community, then, seems to be less about where we are, or who we are, but instead what we choose to create together.
In each of these communities every day we have an opportunity to create an infinitely large number of these moments with one another and, in each one, we give ourselves a wealth of opportunity to step into them and bring our fullest selves. A self undistracted, a self un-judging, a self with an open mind and an extended hand, a self that celebrates shared experience and resists categorical judgments. A self that looks around and says 1 + 1 can equal 3. A self that celebrates the belief that, in every moment together with others, a whole can greater than the sum of its parts.
Maybe the wrestling of the colorful leaves and the grounding of fresh coffee overly hyperbolizes my weekend perspectives ahead of a journey away from home. And, of course, the pending week ahead will return our goal-oriented selves into the driver’s seat of daily life. Hedonism and capitalism love Monday morning. Goals for the future will once again narrate our personal headlines. And toward these goals, hedonistic distortion will move the goal posts along the way. Most of us know this all too well by now.
Goal orientation and the pursuit of the future need not cancel out the joy of these moments, but instead make them all the more valuable. These moments contain a quantity and quality of energy, these ordinary and unexpected moments right here in front of us, that we ascribe to lofty achievement moments in the distant future. Salvation, self esteem, calm, and satisfaction, stability, peace. We’ll sacrifice years of our lives now to create discrete moments of brilliance later. Those moments of brilliance in the future are wonderful north stars, not to be discounted. And yet, in a way, perhaps we can tap into them now, in each moment around us, with our neighbors, with our communities, with the world around us acting out the unfolding of life in moment after moment after moment.
If living is a game of Chutes and Ladders, these magical moments of participation in our community seem like ladders. Not ladders forward into the future, but a ladder upward into an elevated state right here and right now. An elevated state of recognition that we are all actors on the stage of life, performing scenes together in every moment of every day. Funny scenes & sweet scenes. Expected scenes & surprise scenes. Big scenes & small scenes. Joyous scenes & somber scenes. Loving scenes, & tragic scenes. And the scenes seem to undoubtedly become rich, vivid, and complete when we perform them, when we fully step into them, together.
Have a great week.
Reed