Sardines

I was at the Monterey Aquarium a few weeks back and decided I really, truly love sardines (the live kind):




Schools of fish are fascinating and beautiful to watch. Certain kinds of fish have an instinct to school, but it's not entirely effortless. Changes of light affect their ability to school, so vision is involved. But the most interesting aspect, to me, is something called the lateral line -- a sensitive area on the sides of the fish that allow them to detect heat and pressure changes from their neighbors, giving them a constant read on their position in the group. This is how the movements of a school can be so quick, with all of the fish reacting instantaneously.

The individuals within the school have two competing needs: to be on the inside of the school, where they are the most protected from predators; and to be on the outside, where there is more oxygen available. And so they weave in and out as they swim, pursuing their own goals, but with an overarching awareness of the group they are a part of and their role within it.

I always wanted to be a fish like that: getting air, getting comfort, never straying too far. But I'm usually halfway across the ocean before I notice I've gotten out of synch. By that time it's generally best to just swim on. And I've found that if you go for long enough, you always find your way back into one school or another.

I love you, New York

There are few things as intimate as a subway ride.

In the veins of the city, we as strangers share our most quiet moments. We relax into ourselves. As Virginia Woolf described the relief of solitude in "To the Lighthouse,"

For now she need not think about anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of–to think; well, not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others.

The incredible beauty of a subway ride is that we all, as strangers, share a silent agreement to allow each other to be visible and invisible at once. It is an aloneness that is different from withdrawing and shutting oneself away. Instead, sitting comfortably in our own cores of darkness, we keep the world in our gaze. And from that vantage point, a deeper kind of compassion is possible.

In this shared solitude, there is little to judge in others because their being requires nothing from you. You can let them all wash around and past you: the loud, flirting teenagers; the little girl swinging from the bars like a gymnast; the little boy watching her quietly and intelligently; the nearly-sleeping woman; the man checking his phone repeatedly even though there is no signal here. All that is required of you is to be there with them, and let them be.

It is impossible to ignore the mystery of other people's lives when you live in this city. You talk to five strangers a day at the least; five more who verge somewhere between acquaintance and stranger. At every moment, you are surrounded by people with names that you will never know. It puts the wonder in you. If you start imagining ideas as clouds of words, you realize that you would never be able to move in a city this thick with human thought. If you visualize love as threads tying one person to another, you realize that you are moving improbably through the most layered cloth.

Every time you walk down the street or board a bus, you feel how deserving people are of your effort to understand them. Their faces tell you that their lives are as thick as yours, because they are, for the moment, not caught up in the effort of mirroring your ideas back at you. The way they hold themselves and the things that they hold show you how complex their worlds are, as complex as yours and probably more so.

Even the places and the objects are full of human meaning. There is nowhere that you can find that is not significant to someone, living or dead. If you start to imagine the layers of attachment, it can become unfathomable. The very same building is the spot where one person fell in love, where another lost someone, where another tripped and broke the grocery bag. In a landscape so full of meaning, you don't even need to have your own connection to a thing to feel its importance. It can be important to you just because of the surety that is has been important to so many others.

And how many others! People different in so many ways that it's like looking through a prism. Even the insecure can hide their weakness here, because you can't look at a person and tell what race they're running.

I know there are dark sides to it. There are the materialistic, and the vain, and the shallow. The man I met who I asked why he decided to pursue his particular line of work, and he looked at me like I was crazy and said, "So I could make money." The people who can't explain satisfactorily what the company they work for does, exactly. The women with the purses that cost as much as a semester's tuition at a private university. The club kids who think that social networking is a worthy way to spend all of one's time. But I love that there's room for that too, here, that there's room for everyone. I don't understand these people, but New York challenges me to try. It doesn't allow me to hide from things I find foreign. It doesn't allow anyone to hide from anything without paying a huge premium for it.

And if I had the time, I would ride the subway for hours for that crazy combination of the strange and the intimate. I would ride it in loops, just watching the people come on and get off, have their private thoughts and look out at the public world. Recently I saw a woman cry, as silently as she could, with a hand lightly over her eyes, across from me on the subway. Just seeing the way that the people around her tensed up with compassion, glancing towards her now and then to see whether they should say something or let her be, reaffirmed to me how good people truly are. It was not indifference. I watched it, and I saw that it was not. It was respect. It was a group of people present as a woman hit a sharp point in her life, and respecting her right to either visibility or invisibility. I know you won't believe me, but that is what I saw in people's faces.

Maybe I'll make the time for that endless subway ride. Because I'm going to have to leave, and I need to take my leave well. A person's life isn't just one story, it's many stories, and sometimes those stories don't fit together the way they should. Leaving here is going to break my heart, because I've never loved a city as much or as long as I've loved New York. But there's another plot line and it says I'm out of here in August. New York, I love you. I'll see you again.