I'm a part of that...

Hello and welcome to blog #2 from a local Chicago coffee shop. Today I’m at Noble Tree Coffee and Tea on Clark, a bit north of Fullerton. So far I’m not entirely impressed with the atmosphere, but they have Savor the Flavor beat on the menu. I’m just finishing a fabulous roast beef sandwich and iced chai latte. A bit expensive, but worth it once and a while for how good it was. Apparently this shop has several floors as well, so maybe I would like the atmosphere a bit better upstairs where there would not be a group of four pretentious people having a ridiculous conversation about interior design right next to me. Jury’s still out on this one.

In other news, happy anniversary to me! Today marks three years since I moved to Chicago. To mark this momentous (read: completely insignificant to everyone but me) occasion, I’m going to write on a topic that was suggested to me by my mother many months ago, while I was still in graduate school. During that year, I lived in Evanston, the first northern suburb, because that is where Northwestern’s main campus is located. And although Evanston is a very pleasant place to live, I spent the whole year saying that I could not wait to move back into the city. About the 98^th time my mother had to endure the complaint, she suggested that I write a blog about why I was so desperate to move back.

I never wrote that blog, not only because it was another eight months before I actually started writing again instead of just talking about it, but because I was not sure I could articulate my reasons for being so bothered by being outside the city’s borders. I am still not sure I can, but I think I’ve gained enough understanding of myself and the city over the last six months to give it a shot.

You see, for me, the city of Chicago is not just a location. It’s a way of life. So many aspects of my life changed the day I moved here. I wrote about one of the big ones last week: I now walk or take the train almost everywhere I go. This alone changed the way I think about how to best organize my day and about what I have to carry with me. For instance, stopping at a store on the way home requires not only knowing where the store is, like it would if I drove, but knowing what train stop is closest to it and whether the best way to get home is to get back on the same train I got off or take another. Generally speaking, coming home first before going somewhere after work doesn’t make a lot of sense, as so many things lie somewhere between my office at 6000 south in Hyde Park and my apartment at 2800 north in Lincoln Park. So, if I need anything for after-work activities, it has to come with me to work. On the flip side of that, I also have to think harder about what I really need to have with me. It’s not a good idea to carry extraneous stuff, because I do actually have to carry it with me wherever I go. There’s no leaving it in my car. If I am going anywhere but work on a work day, there generally has to be a plan mapped out in my head the day before.

Living here has also fundamentally changed my sense of time. For example, my sister lives about 4 miles north of me. On a good day, it takes me about a half-hour to get to her apartment from mine. The strange thing about that is, I think she lives quite close. While I was in high school, the people that lived a half-hour away lived on the opposite end of town from me. Indeed, the 15-minute drive from my high school to my house just outside of town in Zilwaukee was considered a really long trip. (No one ever wanted to come and get me or take me home. It was very sad. My parents allowed me to use some savings to buy a car when I turned 16, simply because they were so tired of having to take my places when my friends refused to pick me up.) Pre-Chicago, a half-hour trip was a burden. Now, it’s a pleasant little jaunt. My sense of time is so altered now that I have a really hard time judging how long things will take when I am not in the city. When I was at my parents’ house in August, one day my mother asked me to run three or four errands and do some cooking for a party we were throwing the next day. I told her I would try, but wasn’t sure I would get it all done. As it would turn out, I was done with all the errands and back home by 10am. The fact that I had a car and could drive point to point, and that the locations of all three errands were in about a one-mile radius, apparently did not factor into my calculations.

Anyway, my point is not to bore you with all the ways that big-city life differs from small-town or even suburban life. I am simply pointing out that there ARE huge and fundamental differences between how I live my life now and how I lived my life in Evanston. So, why do I like city life so much better? The couple of things I described above make it seem like a burden. You have to do more planning ahead, and everything takes longer.

The fact is, being an efficient city-dweller develops over time just like any other skill. Everyday existence is practice, and practice makes perfect. The longer you live here, the more you learn about the best ways to get around, the tools that help you carry more with you than you ever thought you were capable of, and closest stores that have anything you need. City-dwellers know secrets about the city that no one else knows. Not really because we jealously guard the secrets, but because they are things you won’t ever need or want to know unless you live here.

This phenomenon fascinates me, because it makes the city seem like a living, self-sustaining being. Only people that live here know what the difficulties and annoyances are, and so they start businesses in an attempt to alleviate those burdens. Then, simply by going about their everyday lives, which necessarily involve some walking and exploring, residents uncover these new secrets and support them. The city lifestyle helps to keep the city running. I really believe that only by living here awhile and letting the city change the way you think and exist can you understand its needs and contribute to them. Hopefully, that makes some sort of sense to you.

But again returning to my original question: how does all this relate to me being so desperate to move back into the city? Simply put, living in the city makes me feel connected to the rest of the people that live here. I see this city as one, connected, living entity, and I love the feeling of being part of the reason it remains alive. Simply by living here, I have a certain mutual understanding with all the people I pass on the streets and bump elbows with on the train. We all know the same secrets that people that non-city-dwellers simply don’t. We all have something in common and all know something about each other.

And that makes me feel less alone. Even though I live by myself, and do a lot of things on my own, and have had to learn to be self-sufficient in ways I never could have imagined, I feel less lonely living here than I would if all those things were still true and I lived somewhere else.

The funny thing about these blogs is that occasionally the act of writing them helps me understand things that I never have before. This is one of those times. Suddenly I realize that one of the huge reasons I would so unhappy in graduate school was that I was horrendously lonely. That’s why I was so desperate to move back into the city. Although I really loved my classmates, I simply did not think about the subject matter or the world of academia or life in general the way they did, and I felt very our of place and disconnected from the world. I wanted to move back to the city where I understood how people thought and lived.

I’m not sure I have made all of this as clear for you as I have made it for myself, so I am going to digress for a moment in an effort to explain this another way.

Are any of you familiar with the PostSecret project? There is a link to it on the right side of this page, under my profile. Basically, the founder of the project invites anyone who wishes to send in an anonymous postcard with a secret written on it. He then chooses the best ones out of the mountains of cards he receives and posts a couple dozen on a blog each week.

The project has an enormous following and has been going on for several years now. Tons of people have written to the founder, saying how moved they are, and how the share the same secrets, and how the project has changed their lives. I am a faithful reader of the posts, but I confess that I don’t connect with the project in the manner that the writers of those letters do. I find the secrets quite interesting and the art is sometimes breath-taking, but I don’t tend to share the secrets. In fact, for a long time, I felt like I didn’t even have a secret. Even if I wanted to send in a post card, I wouldn’t know what to say.

Yet, I kept reading each week. I think maybe I was hoping that one day I would have to moving, emotional experience that everyone kept talking about.

Then one day, I was scrolling down the page and stopped on a postcard that had a picture of hands reaching into the center of a circle. The text said, “I just want to be a part of something. Anything.”

I confess that I did not have an emotional breakdown or feel my life had been changed. But I did feel like I was looking at my own secret. It was not an emotional moment for me because it was something I had always known about myself, but I had never articulated it quite so well. The deepest, most desperate desire of my heart is to be part of something that matters. To be vital to someone and something. To matter.

In some small but fundamental way, living in the city makes me feel like I am a part of something. I think that’s the best way I can explain it.

I still think I may have been ineffective in communicating my feeling about this, but I have come to understand it better by writing this. So, thank you for reading.

As always, feel free to post comments or email me if there’s anything else you’d like me to write about. Next time, I will try my hand at something funnier. But on this, my third anniversary in Chicago, somehow this topic felt appropriate.

Have a fantastic day, and get out and enjoy the summertime weather! And I say this to all of you with the utmost sincerity: I wish you all the happiness and peace of mind that living in this city gives me.