The Melting World

My son commandeered the navigation through the woof and weave of the New York subway system. The few times  I tried to “help out,” we ended up on the wrong platform or even once on an express train toward Rockaway.

Okay, I was quite useful once–when the trip required a bus detour due to a temporary closure that I knew about from checking the Internet, but from here on as we find ourselves in future cities on as yet unplanned journeys, I plan to defer to the young one, who knows best.

The NYC vibe exudes chaotic, noisy, often smelly, energy and I think it’s true to say we all feel more alive there than here. The nearness to people of all different fashions, skin colors, languages, and the rich tapestry of faces inside one subway car feels more humane, and we belong. We breathe easier.

In Minneapolis I feel more separated, more different, outside the box, and often the observer. I live inside my mind and its constructed comfortable pattern, where I define what I find safe, predictable, boring, irritating, or desirable. Not much surprises me here–which is not to say that’s bad per se–but  life here is just not as inspiring or as lively as when I lived in Tokyo, Kyoto, Asahikawa or as how engaged I felt when I traveled through other parts of the world–and I am not as connected with fellow human beings here because we all have a lot more space and we Midwesterners steer toward isolation, perhaps because of the winter prairie and the invention of furnaces, now we are mentally, emotionally, and physically set apart like fence posts dotting  a landscape during a winter storm.

When I expressed to my mother how good it felt to be able to hear probably fifteen languages in one day while we were bustling about NYC, she commented that even in her small Midwestern town she easily can encounter many different languages in a day.

And it’s true, I can say the same about Minneapolis–but I think it is the physical proximity to people that changes the energy from passive observer into inspired participator for me. To see people of all shapes and sizes standing at a bus stop while I zoom past in my automobile is an  incredibly different experience, it’s a distancing aesthetic, quite apart from the act of swaying hip to hip with strangers on an overcrowded, screeching, careening rickety subway car.

To smile at people who find my son’s ecstatic vigor inside subway cars entertaining, or to experience people offering him a seat on the crowded train, or to hook his shoes nest to me so they don’t dirty the cashmere coat or the torn raincoat of a fellow passenger and to then see them acknowledge and appreciate my effort–to see their smiles inside their eyes.

These small, brief human interactions build connections with others. I don’t feel as alone, and I don’t feel as much an outsider or, rather, I feel a part of a collection of outsiders, a large, misfit river of eccentrics all flowing in the same direction, and collectively we travel, destination unknown.