Bobby texted me the equivalent of the writer’s bat signal this week so I figured it was time to write again. I also feel kind of called out so this is now a challenge.
Today is the quintessential rainy April day—there is a dense fog over the Hudson River and a Seattle drizzle to make anything outside unpleasant. so I’m finally allowing myself to sit inside and take care of things that have piled up in my backlog: taxes, bills, etc. It is also a great day to wake up, drink a strong coffee, blast some Frank Ocean and write.
Frankly, I haven’t been writing much since things have started to open up again, and the weather has been incredibly nice on the weekends. It’s weird to see some things go back to normal after essentially a year of the city being quiet. I ran some errands yesterday and was hit by the New York hustle that I hadn’t seen since last March—street stands hawking fake Gucci bags, aspiring rappers shoving demo tapes into my hands, and streets uncomfortably crowded. All of this was normal in the City of old, but now it felt weirdly foreign.
People are dabbling in normal activities again. Many of my friends, including myself, have been vaccinated fully or partially and are starting to discuss normal summer activities - travel to summer homes, birthday brewery visits, etc. I find myself wanting to be social - dinners on the weekdays and park days on the weekends. This is why one lives in New York after all - to be uncomfortably close to all your friends and all the activities. After a year of Zoom birthdays, fear of visiting our parents, extensive testing before doing anything, etc., normalcy is very exciting. While we are not out of the woods, there seems to be hope that soon, the worst will be over.
But what else will normalcy bring? With it comes the stress of making plans, the feeling of missing out on activities, and importantly a sense of busyness that makes taking a day off hard. One of the nicest parts of the forced isolation was the reminder that boredom can be reviving. I lived and died by my daily routine and doing the little things that entertained me, instead of events and trips and THINGS.
The trap I have fallen into recently is forgetting that it is possible to experience boredom outside of forced isolation. One can spend a day simply sitting inside and reading or cleaning your space and it’s a perfectly valid day. It’s ok to do NOTHING. In fact, doing so makes space for doing and enjoying the big exciting things, instead of filling your time with experiences you are not even sure you want. You have time to process, relax and figure out what you really want to do.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m excited to get back to traveling regularly and going out to bars and all the things I loved to do before the pandemic. I just don’t want to lose track of the reminder that sometimes it is nice to not do anything as well. In a city with as much hustle as New York, it’s easy to forget - it hawks its shiny wares, cheap tricks, and expensive consumerism. But it is possible to sit back and avoid it - even if just for a rainy day.
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