the grass is always greener on the other side

since forever and ever, i've been thinking in "what if"s and wondering incessantly about what i do not have (though i realize that this is ridiculous). today i am thinking about this path i've taken that's brought me here, to new york city, and how this chapter will soon end. and it was one simple decision that placed me in this world and not another one.

i don't think i believe in regret. but for the last three years i've wondered what form my life would have taken had i chosen a different place to spend the four years of this chapter of my growth. when i was in the middle of nowhere, in bennington, vermont, all i wanted was to get out. to be in the city where things were happening, where i could interact with people other than just rich, white, 18-22 year old college students. i wanted diversity and culture and all the magic that is alive in this terrific place. so one day i just made the decision, and that was it. i left the rolling hills where autumn was so beautiful you'd cry just looking out your window, and i came to this island of concrete.

what if i'd initially picked any of the other schools? what if i went to bard or hampshire or friends' world? it is pointless and stupid to think in this way because i cannot go back four years and re-decide. but i do think this way, and it's very painful.

there are days when this city swallows me whole. when the anonymity and loneliness are oppressive. when the buildings are all i see and there aren't gardens with organic vegetables or sunsets over mountains or silence. there is no silence here.

today i am very upset because i feel like maybe i made a mistake. new york city will always be here. it isn't going anywhere. almost every person i've met here whom i've enjoyed has been in his/her late-20s or 30s or 40s or 50s or 60s. in other words...not college students. people journey here after they experience the chapter that i decided to live here. i feel so foolish! like i've missed out on something that i will never be able to gain...because i was in a rush to meet this place.

i'm sure this makes no sense or seems like a pointless stretch of complaints. i am simply mad at myself today. i am thinking what if what if what if. what if i'd gone to the countryside of massachusetts.

i can answer the "what if" to some degree. if i had not come to nyc, i never would have experienced living with nick for a year. i probably wouldn't have made the kibbutz documentary. i probably wouldn't have gotten closer to my brother.

but right now, i am thinking about how lovely the trees smelled in vermont and how quiet the mornings were when everyone was asleep. i'm thinking of that academic freedom that is coupled with all those middle-of-nowhere liberal arts institutions that i'm what if-ing about.

ok, enough.

dancing up boulders

I'm having a terrible week.
I want to dance up a mountain like the characters in Jack Kerouac's story.
From The Dharma Bums:


...it seemed that I had seen the ancient afternoon of that trail, from meadow rocks and lupine posies, to sudden revisits with the roaring stream with its splashed snag bridges and undersea greennesses, there was something inexpressibly broken in my heart as though I'd lived before and walked this trail, under similar circumstances with a fellow Bodhisattva, but maybe on a more important journey, I felt like lying down by the side of the trail and remembering it all. The woods do that to you, they always look familiar, long lost, like the face of a long-dead relative, like an old dream, like a piece of forgotten song drifting across the water, most of all like golden eternities of past childhood or past manhood and all the living and the dying and the heartbreak that went on a million years ago and the clouds as they pass overhead seem to testify (by their own lonesome familiarity) to this feeling. Ecstasy, even, I felt, with flashes of sudden remembrance, and feeling sweaty and drowsy I felt like sleeping and dreaming in the grass. As we got higher we got more tired and now like two true mountain climbers we weren't talking any more and didn't have to talk and were glad, in fact Japhy mentioned that, turned to me after a half-hour's silence, "This is the way I like it, when you get going there's just no need to talk, as if we were animals and just communicated by silent telepathy." So huddled in our own thoughts we tromped on....Pretty soon we got to the top of the part of the trail that was a trail no more, to the incomparable dreamy meadow, which had a beautiful pond, and after that it was boulders and nothing but boulders.

Monday

It upsets me when after feeling like I've moved on from something, I find myself fallen again. Back in the same holes or valleys or traps or caves--fighting the same parts of myself that are rooted in histories of emotion.

I hate it when loneliness sweeps over me. There are days when I feel disconnected from everybody and completely unsure of what it means to be human if there are no humans tied to my heart.

I want to write a short story about this, but I don't know how.

I miss feeling certain about my role in another person's life...knowing that my path and my decisions are connected to someone else's. Of course, that means compromise, which can be a miserable thing. But it also means being bound by love. And now I am not bound. I am utterly free.

But as Dylan brilliantly sang:

Are birds free from the chains of the skyway?