Constant Revisions
There is a saying about having the best-laid plans that pretty much concludes that you can't plan for ridiculousness, which I am a huge advocate of. I've never been the kind of person who has been able to make strict life plans and keep them (get married by this age, have kids by that, et cetera). I think that the idea is at least having a plan B (or acknowledging that one exists, whether you want to use it or not). But sometimes, there simply is no plan.
Kurt Ross and I were having dinner with Boulder friends, Katie Bono and Ben Chapman, last spring when Katie asked me about living in New York. I loved my time there and thought it was an important chapter in my life, but after leaving the east coast and moving out to Colorado, it would be impossibly hard to go back. I said, “You couldn’t pay me to move back to New York City.” with a laugh.
“Live in New York City once, but leave before it makes you hard. Live in Northern California once, but leave before it makes you soft” – not Kurt Vonnegut
Except, Kurt was offered a nine-month contract with PBS and between all of the travel and long-distance for the better part of a year, deep down, I knew that when Kurt asked me to move with him, the answer was already a thousand percent “yes”. Moving back to New York to be together felt like it could be another important chapter—for both of us, and I didn’t want to miss it.
When I first moved to Brooklyn, I felt like I wasn’t ready. And then—five years later, I felt completely unprepared to depart. John Long says of The Nose: you are never ready for The Big Stone. Nobody really can be until after it’s finished. But putting off changes and trying things to play it safe will never make you more secure; it will only make you less so. It’s very human to feel uncomfortable with uncertainty–it’s the reason why people find themselves in marriages that leave them lonely, jobs that they dislike, and situations they feel “stuck” in.
“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” – Henry David Thoreau (also not Vonnegut)
People asked me if it was a hard decision to move back, and truthfully it wasn’t. The city makes sense to me. When I walk outside, I look around the bustling streets filled with commuters, mothers pushing baby strollers, packs of dogs trotting en masse, cyclists whizzing by with sushi and flower deliveries, and I think to myself, “Oh, this is what the inside of my brain probably looks like.”
Kurt doesn’t love New York. But I don’t think he quite hates it, either. We live in Queens which feels really far away from my old life in Brooklyn, but maybe that’s a good thing. I told Kurt that you have to sort of embrace New York in all of its shittiness, because that’s when you can start to see some its beauty.