A golf cart picked me up as the rain started to come down. I had equipment for a small shoot we were doing for work at the Austin City Limits Music Festival. While driving from the parking lot to the place where the media representatives set up shop, I smelled India. For ten seconds I was in a small blue Indian version of a Pinto with Paul and Sujay Pillai who had just picked me up at the New Delhi airport. The sooty smell of a myriad fires burning a million different things scattered across the cityscape somehow made it’s way to Austin, TX. That brief remembrance felt like home, yet I only lived there for 2 weeks. That was 4 years ago come this November. I was on the front end of healing from a broken engagement. Manhattan was a 13.4 mile long reminder of what didn’t happen. No one could completely understand and I don’t think I wanted to either. What I knew to be home for the past 4 1/2 years at that point was no longer. That smell was the beginning of something altogether new.
Home. What does it look.taste.feel.smell.sound. like?
Tim Keller said that every five years or so you must rebuild your community here in New York. I suppose the constant rebuilding of community and a safe place to dwell is common for all cities, but just heightened, accelerated, and exacerbated by the hyper transient nature of “our town”. The very fact that home isn’t a constant stable “place” is an ever present reminder of where we are not.
I’m a Texan transplant (by way of Virginia) living in New York City. 8 1/2 years almost to the day. I call my 6th apartment since I’ve lived here home, but when I go back to Texas I know that I’m just straddling familiarities. I’m a glutton for a Texan sky/sunset. I think they are only bigger and better in Africa. I can consume ample amounts of Texan beer and bbq and watch hours of Texas A&M football (despite the inevitable disappointment). The conversational kindness from strangers catches me off guard. The cynic in me questions it. I don’t like being a cynic.
Of late, New York is feeling strangely unfamiliar. By October 15th-ish I’ll have had 5 of my closest friends leave. All left within a span of two years of one another. When you leave New York you normally leave for good. Not out of spite or weariness of the lifestyle, but rather people change and the city doesn’t. You can read quotes from people that moved here during the Potato Famine and encounter that same aesthetic that someone speaks of today. Check out E.B. White’s Here is New York. The city is always moving, but never changing. Evolving, but forever familiar. This is why this city is so transient. We consume (commit to) the movement and the aesthetic, the opportunities and vitality, but we soon enough get our fill, or find that our focus has shifted. What has become important no longer carries the same weight or the things that once enthralled the depths of our being are now only a whisper.
I’m still here. The longer I am, I realize there is a constant tension between being known and getting enveloped in the movement of the city. At a visceral level it becomes easiest to take and consume. Always moving. Lost in that movement can be what you actually enjoy. C.S. Lewis explains this better than I could in the analogy of a demon talking to the Devil on how to tear down a human being:
“And now for your blunders. On your own showing you first of all allowed the patient to read a book he really enjoyed, because he enjoyed it and not in order to make clever remarks about it to his new friends. In the second place, you allowed him to walk down to the old mill and have tea there—a walk through country he really likes, and taken alone. In other words you allowed him two real positive Pleasures. Were you so ignorant as not to see the danger of this? The characteristic of Pains and Pleasures is that they are unmistakably real, and therefore, as far as they go, give the man who feels them a touchstone of reality. Thus if you had been trying to damn your man by the Romantic method—by making him a kind of Childe Harold or Werther submerged in self-pity for imaginary distresses—you would try to protect him at all costs from any real pain; because, of course, five minutes’ genuine toothache would reveal the romantic sorrows for the nonsense they were and unmask your whole stratagem. But you were trying to damn your patient by the World, that is by palming off vanity, bustle, irony, and expensive tedium as pleasures. How can you have failed to see that a real pleasure was the last thing you ought to have let him meet? Didn’t you foresee that it would just kill by contrast all the trumpery which you have been so laboriously teaching him to value? And that the sort of pleasure which the book and the walk gave him was the most dangerous of all? That it would peel off from his sensibility the kind of crust you have been forming on it, and make him feel that he was coming home, recovering himself? As a preliminary to detaching him from the Enemy, you wanted to detach him from himself, and had made some progress in doing so. Now, all that is undone.” C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
The rain continued. By the time Bon Iver made it on stage at 5pm the rain was there to stay for the day. Mid way through Skinny Love the rain started coming down so hard I ditched the umbrella. Bon Iver in the rain. How many more times is this going to happen in my life? None. The more I sang the, the more I realized how much I needed to sing. I met a 65 year old lady who was there with her yoga instructor. She ditched her umbrella as well. She didn’t know the words, but she sang.
“This is not the sound of a new man or crispy realization. It’s the sound of the unlocking and the lift away.” – Justin Vernon, Re: Stacks
In those moments I realize that I don’t even know what I need on a moment by moment basis, but it is the deep calling out to deep where I recognize my need. Nor do even realize it when God is starting to show up, allowing us to enjoy things in order to reveal Greater things. His Love and Restoration.
“O Lord our God, under the shadow of thy wings let us Hope — defend us and support us. Thou wilt bear us up when we are little and even down to our gray hairs thou wilt carry us. For our stability, when it is in thee, is stability indeed; but when it is in ourselves, then it is all unstable. Our good lives forever with thee, and when we turn from thee with aversion, we fall into our own perversion. Let us now, O Lord, return that we be not overturned, because with thee our good lives without blemish — for our good is thee thyself. And we need not fear that we shall find no place to return to because we fell away from it. For, in our absence, our home — which is thy eternity — does not fall away.” -Saint Augustine
