I traveled to New York last week for a little bit of a break from work. I don’t typically travel that far for breaks (backyards, front porches suffice) but I wanted to walk around on my own for a little while and rid my head of the muck (you know that scene at the beginning of Titanic where Bill Paxton’s character is pulling soggy paper and water out of Cal’s safe? That’s my version of muck.) that has built up over the past few months. It was wonderful, and I hope to post some pictures up soon–but generally, I was trying to focus less on a memory of the moment and more on the experience of the moment.
Strangely, the day before I left and on the day I came back, I was rife with anxiety. Several things could have been the source–airplanes, strangers, subways, big cities–but all of that I’d seen and experienced before. I felt weird and unsure. A walking metaphor.
I was reminded of the phrase above–“all adventurous women do”–(taken from the first season of HBO’s Girls) a phrase that seems to have struck a lot of people in different ways. (You can watch the debate in action in the comments of this Jezebel article, which might’ve been the reason the phrase was so neatly in my mind.) To me, it’s aspirational in the sense that we find we’re hyper-connected in ways that only seem real some of the time, and even that time is finite. It’s about seeing your life clearly and living it deliberately because … all adventurous women do.
What do you think? And, what do you do to rid yourself of the muck?
essayem.wordpress.com 