The Things We Choose

The City I Dreamed Of

On Thanksgiving mornings, I used to wake up in my grandmother's California King to the sounds of her preparing dinner in the kitchen.

I could smell the food before I got out of bed. I'd turn on the television in her room and watch the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, waiting for the enormous balloons and elaborate floats to make their way through Manhattan.

My grandmother would come in to watch with me. She was delighted by the spectacle, every bit as excited about the floats as I was. Then she'd return to the kitchen, and I'd keep watching New York unfold on the television.

By middle school, I'd decided I was going to live there.

Even as a child, I could sense the power of the city before I understood what power was. There was something about New York that captivated me. I couldn't have explained it then, but I knew I wanted to be part of it.

I was also growing up in the eighties, a decade in which good judgment was not always a prerequisite for enthusiasm.

At some point in elementary school, I decided I wanted a perm.

Everyone had one. Or at least everyone whose hair I admired seemed to have one. The enormous, exuberant hairstyles of the period were everywhere, and I was convinced that a perm would be a considerable improvement to my appearance.

I emerged looking like a poodle.

I was horrified.

There's something especially cruel about a bad hairstyle at that age. You can't simply change your mind the following morning. You have to go to school and allow everyone else to experience the consequences of your decision.

I had wanted something very badly, acquired it, and immediately wished I hadn't.

Fortunately, most of our desires don't require several months to grow out.

It's remarkable how certain we can be about something we've never experienced. We construct an elaborate picture of how it will look, how it will feel, and what it might change about our lives. Sometimes reality is everything we imagined. Sometimes we find ourselves wearing a hat for the foreseeable future.

And occasionally, something we never thought to want turns out to be wonderful.

When I first moved to New York at seventeen, I loved being anonymous.

Nobody knew anything about me. I'd never experienced that before, and I found it liberating. I could walk for hours, exploring streets and neighborhoods, surrounded by people whose lives I knew nothing about and who knew nothing about mine.

I felt at home immediately.

It's difficult to explain that feeling to someone who experiences New York as overwhelming. The crowds, the traffic, the sounds outside the window. These are the very things that comfort me. The city has a rhythm that changes with the hour, the weather, and the season.

I also love the peculiar combination of anonymity and familiarity that New York makes possible. I can disappear into the city for an afternoon and return to a building and neighborhood where people know me.

My grandmother's house was another place where I felt that kind of belonging, although the feeling there was entirely different. Her home was warm and familiar, a safe cocoon in which I never had to wonder whether I belonged.

New York gave me a different sort of freedom.

I didn't understand any of this when I was watching the parade as a child. I simply wanted to go.

The Things I Never Knew to Want

I eventually left New York for what I believed would be a temporary move to Texas. I was supposed to return the following year.

One year became many.

I had children and built a life there, but I never stopped wanting to return to New York.

What I couldn't have anticipated was the entirely different world I would discover along the way.

There was a period of my life in Texas when my days and evenings were filled with an extraordinary assortment of people, practices, and experiences. I had wonderful friends and was deeply involved in a community that seemed capable of turning almost any occasion into a ceremony.

There were cacao ceremonies, ecstatic dance, kirtan, drum circles, and full moon meditations. We practiced yoga, chanted, drank Chinese tea, explored Tantra, and gathered for ceremonies drawn from spiritual traditions around the world.

There were herbs, incense, and a great deal of time spent barefoot.

There was also hiking and, on occasion, skinny-dipping in a creek beneath the moonlight.

It was a long way from the Manhattan life I'd imagined as a little girl watching the Thanksgiving parade.

And I loved it.

I loved the friendships, the conversations, and the freedom to explore things I hadn't previously encountered. I organized events, attended other people's gatherings, and became immersed in experiences that engaged my body, imagination, and curiosity in entirely new ways.

I was developing parts of myself I hadn't known before. I was happy and free in ways that were new to me, even though life itself was far from uncomplicated.

I hadn't grown up dreaming of chanting Sanskrit, drinking ceremonial cacao, or swimming naked in a creek. I wouldn't have known to put any of those things on a list of what I wanted from life.

I had to encounter them first.

Some of what I discovered eventually found its way into my work with CEOs, people whose professional lives might appear to have very little in common with an ecstatic dance gathering or a meditation ceremony.

The experiences that shaped my understanding of people didn't all come from the places I expected them to. Some came from rooms full of accomplished executives. Others came from sitting on the floor, chanting with a group of people who had absolutely no interest in discussing quarterly earnings.

Coming Home

In December 2020, I returned to New York with my children.

At the time, the prevailing opinion seemed to be that New York was finished.

The pandemic had emptied offices, shuttered restaurants, and transformed streets that were ordinarily crowded into something almost unrecognizable. People were leaving, and there was endless speculation about whether the city would ever recover.

I didn't believe it.

I'd lived in New York on September 11. I'd seen the city endure catastrophe before, and I had no doubt that it would come alive again.

But I wasn't waiting for that to happen.

I'd spent the preceding months in Arizona with my grandmother, who was dying of congestive heart failure. After she died, circumstances in my life changed, and I was finally able to return to New York.

The children were excited. They'd spent many weeks in the city throughout their lives and knew it well. My son was so convinced of his connection to New York that I discovered later he actually believed he'd been born there.

We rented an apartment on the Upper East Side.

It was winter, and we'd arrived with wardrobes better suited to Austin than a Manhattan winter. The children were attending school on Zoom. Our movers took six weeks to deliver our belongings, so we slept on air mattresses and lived out of suitcases.

The city was unusually quiet.

Restaurants were permitted to serve diners outdoors. By then, I'd long since retired from cooking, so we ate dinner outside.

In New York.

In December.

It was completely ridiculous.

But we were home.

I didn't wish we'd waited for the restaurants to reopen or for the city to recover. I could still feel New York beneath the quiet. The city was different, but it was still the place I loved.

Several months later, I discovered that Madonna lived across the street.

Madonna, my idol.

I'd managed to move into an apartment opposite her without knowing it.

More Things to Love

I've wondered occasionally how much of what we want is shaped by the limits of what we've experienced.

We make plans based on the lives we know. We admire people, acquire tastes, imagine ourselves in circumstances we've never encountered, and develop ideas about what would make us happy.

Some of those ideas turn out to be remarkably accurate. Others don't survive their first encounter with reality.

But there are pleasures we can't imagine until something or someone introduces us to them.

I knew I wanted to live in New York long before I understood why. What I couldn't have anticipated was how much I'd love gathering with friends for ceremonies, dancing for hours, or exploring spiritual traditions I'd barely known existed.

Those experiences didn't replace my love of New York. They gave me more things to love.

We can become so occupied with figuring out what we want from life that we forget how much of it we haven't encountered yet.

We become attached to a particular picture of the future, complete with the right career, relationships, home, and accomplishments. We may even begin to measure our lives against that picture, as though our younger selves had access to information we don't.

It's possible to know what you want and still be surprised by what you love.

I don't think every desire needs an explanation. Nor do I think we owe our former selves a lifetime of loyalty to everything they once wanted.

I certainly have no wish to revisit the perm.

The Parade

Every Thanksgiving, my family discusses going to the parade.

Every year, we entertain the possibility that this might finally be the year. And every year, we watch it on television, as New Yorkers tend to do.

I took my son once when he was very little. My daughter has never been.

I still love watching the enormous balloons make their way through Manhattan. And I still think about my grandmother.

I remember the warmth of her house, the sounds of her preparing dinner, and how safe I felt lying in her bed while we watched the parade together.

She didn't know I was dreaming of living in New York. I didn't really understand the dream myself.

I was a little girl in a place where I felt completely at home, watching another place that I somehow knew I wanted to be.

All these years later, I'm still watching the parade.

Only now, I'm watching from New York.