City walks
Thoughts on where your mind goes when your legs are going too
I recently developed a routine where I drop my kids off at school in the morning then come home to pee and change into clothes that overlap somewhere on the Venn diagram of making me feel like a well-dressed version of myself (it motivates me) but also accommodating my walking for as long and as far as my feet will take me.
You would not believe some of the footwear choices I’ve made — suede fisherman shoes from Massimo Dutti or Grenson, Jamie Haller’s double buckle and walking sandals, Havaianas flip flops (the only ones that have insofar given me a blister) and navy suede loafers. Only once did I indulge in the convenience of a pair of sneakers and they were barely even actually sneakers.
Walking feels like the closest thing to daily progress these days. If it is usually hitting a deadline or nailing/executing a creative idea that gives me the feeling of accomplishment, getting into bed at night feeling physically exhausted from the hips down is it for me now — the difference between a good and bad day.
There’s something so uncomplicated and tender about feeling like in the course of a day, all I really need is an hour and change to take a walk.
Often these walks have exceeded 5 miles, and there is a rhythm about their flow. They start quiet and slow, even a little bit sluggish, mirroring the almost sleepy neighborhood of Carnegie Hill where I live.
Then at around 74th street and Madison (where there is a deli or a gourmet market, you can call it what you want, but it never quite hits with the right food, beverage or candy selection; the redeeming quality are the banana leaves, which are always there in a bucket and have lasted as long as two months in my dining room) is when the walks start to pick up pace. When I start to zip down the Avenue, almost unaware that I’m moving at all until I reach about 55th street.
The time alone is like a psychic clean-up
Sometimes I’m listening to music, other times a podcast. I loved a recent interview I heard with Jerry Seinfeld. The first time I heard him on a podcast, I was surprised by the richness of his inner life. The depth of thought he gives to his work, how seriously he takes it, which is different from taking yourself too seriously.
For someone so deadpan and cynical and seemingly logical, he seems to have a lot of faith, which I say because for someone so deadpan and cynical and seemingly logical, I can also tell he believes in magic. That is — the magic that greets us when we open up to the flow of life. And you can’t really know there’s magic here if you don’t also have faith in it.
But lately, really, it’s just me and the pavement. The time alone is like a psychic clean up.
About a mile into these walks is usually when the feelings in my chest start to serve as a compass that leads me to the next place.
I think about the most important relationships: all good with my partner? My kids? My mom? When they can pass through me with little contraction, I know all is well. When I start to get tight, or anger erupts, there’s more to examine.
But sometimes, all I see are the outfits and this is the summer of ugly shorts
Sometimes the walk is the clean up, but often, I just take note and come back to the tightness or anger because I get distracted when I’m on the road. Yesterday, for example, at around 55th street, I encountered this woman who must have been early into her 60s and she was wearing a loose fit button down shirt with utilitarian Bermuda shorts and Keds. The color scheme ran a gamut from light khaki to dark and none of it was conspicuous, but it felt like The Row, maybe because none of it was conspicuous, and I thought to myself: I could make that.
I wish I had a picture of her but I was too slow to get my phone. There were, however, two other instances, a little different but still ugly-shorts adjacent that did incline me further.
Later, I gave the first woman’s look a try:
As I kept walking, I noticed more and more cargo shorts on passersby — not always styled into fashion looks:
But I had seen a pair on a very chic friend over the weekend and that context must have given this context more context. I took out my phone, did a prelim search and found these from H&M. 30 blocks later, I walked in to buy them.
It’s kind of cool that sometimes all you need is the smallest seed planted by someone whose taste you admire and trust to transform what your eyes see when they’re looking.
When I passed the Trump Tower in midtown, guarded as usual by barricades and police officers, I had this thought about whether people are incensed by him because he doesn’t care that they are — about the way women are so rarely impervious to criticism, how easy it is to knock each other down because we’re so quick to take the bait, to try to make good on the criticism and reach resolution.
It’s a beautiful quality when you consider that the ultimate goal for so many of us seems to be harmony within communion, but so often it happens at the expense of a key ingredient when it comes to harmoniousness, which is staying true to ourselves.
Why is it so natural for women to knock each other down?
I guess it was on my mind because just that morning I’d been talking to a mom I interviewed for the What do moms wear series and she said something simple but true, which is that everyone wants you to live your best life until you’re actually living your best life.
Then you become hateable.
I could see my own participation in this flywheel — the way I get protective when I’m feeling good instead of spreading my wings to give shade where its needed, or shining brighter to give light where its dark. I could also recall how in some instances, I start to contract when I can feel another woman in flow — as if their expansion, their rhythm, their yes means my curling in, contracting, my no.
I guess when you’re in the presence of someone who seems like they’re on their rocket ship and you’re less sure whether you’re on your own, or can get to your own, you want them to slow down or come down or be at your level. Or in worst case scenarios, you want them below you. It’s a coping mechanism, I think, or some way we try to protect ourselves. From what? I guess feeling threatened.
Under the behavior, I have to assume, is the benevolent fear that we’ll get left behind.
I don’t know how conscious it is that some of us do this, it seems more unconscious to me, and definitely unique to the female experience. The American female experience — which I specify but maybe I’m wrong. The idea comes from my upbringing and the way that I could not wrap my head around the social rules of the game all the girls played around me.
My mom is Iranian and grew up surrounded by women: three sisters who practically raised her, 7 aunts and a mom who spent their lives shouldering the joy, but mostly grief of one another. 3 cousins who became, and still are, her best friends. She didn’t get it either, and therefore couldn’t really help me. Neither did my brothers care to understand what confusion mangled my inner world.
I learned how to play by their rules for myself. And the outcome of getting the game right — of “winning,” was often the feeling of fierce separation. The irony I recognize now is that I only wanted to play so I could belong. But it never brought me closer.
As I thought about what that mom said in our interview and the rest of the conversation we’d had, I recalled that she seemed so full of herself.
I mean this in the best way possible. There was a sparkle about her sense of awareness, her knowing what she needs to be good: happy as a mother, as a person and how…unapologetic but soft she seemed about pursuing it.
I had to assume there were women in her life who knew intuitively and effortlessly how to lift each other. Sure enough, she referenced her sisters and the closest of her childhood friends.
It felt instinctive at first for me to swing into judgment, to cut myself off again — but then freeing to see what was actually there: my own desire wrapped up in the judgment, a protective veneer layered over my longing for the same thing.
The difference between getting what you want, being who you want to be and not is as straightforward as behavior. You act differently from the way you have been and then new thoughts follow. It feels ferociously unnatural at first but new habits do start to form. It actually is as simple as that.
You start to make the new choices and you become different, then your wingspan does spread and the feeling of freedom seeps in through your pores. You’ll know the sensation because from this place, it’s hard not to want for the same magic for everyone around you.
I suspect this is because when you’re free — from the shackles of judgment and shame, competition and martyrdom, the game collapses from its house of cards. There are no winners and losers.
We’re all just here helping each other learn what it’s like to fly.
This is what our matriarchy can look like.
We are all in this together. It would be much more pleasant if we behaved as such. 😊
“The outcome of winning was the feeling of fierce separation” … so well said. A mentor of mine often says the only problem any of us have is thinking we are separate.