Recently I had an opportunity to walk with my 16 year old through Central Park. The day was perfect; mildly warm and sunny and it made us feel very “swoony” because we are both shamelessly in love with New York City.
Jack’s experience of the city is very different from mine. He is a teen growing up in the city under the protection of loving parents, while I am a mother trying to protect, provide for, and raise a young man. Nevertheless, a shared love, even when experienced differently, is still shared. Thus, we swooned. ;)
As we strolled along my son said, “I love seeing buildings under construction! Buildings are a testament of how much we can accomplish when we work together. Not one of these buildings is the work of one person. They are all products of people working together. They are like beacons of possibility. And they are everywhere! Sometimes I look at a building and the way the light hits, I dunno it makes me feel something.... It’s hard to explain.”
I felt like I knew what he was trying to articulate. He was talking about hope. The hope that a city like New York inspires.
I moved to the city when I was 18, limping into adulthood as a raw, wounded human who had been psychologically kneecapped by a traumatic childhood. New York’s roughness, the grime, the dirty messiness, the need to be vigilant and aware, the weirdos and the expense juxtaposed against all the beauty and possibilities felt so… validating. City life channeled my energy. It felt like my insides experience outside my body. It was liberating. And that freedom and autonomy was a wildly ecstatic, foreign feeling.
That feeling was hope.
Hope was something I was so deeply unaccustomed to I didn’t even know what it was. The odd sense of getting away with something, the longing mingled with happiness... it confused me. It took me decades to pin down that pining feeling that made my insides feel warm and a little giddy was in fact, hope.
I’ve been told hope is something we shouldn’t indulge in, that it makes us careless, keeps us from acting in the now. But for me, hope is a wildly wonderful indulgent gift. It is a source of comfort and joy. It buoys me up and propels me forward. It keeps me trying. Without it, I would be utterly lost.
Hope comes to us with a bouquet picked just for us. It is tuned to our specific needs and circumstances. Hope is New York City to me, but New York City isn’t necessarily a hopeful place because what makes it feel hopeful to me, will feel hopeless to someone else. But I think, now more than ever, we each need to find spaces where we can tap into hope. It may be a place, or an activity, or an internal space, but we need to have something that connects us to our creativity and our longing, something that gives us back a sense of wonder and possibilities.
I told Jack, “I think you are feeling hopeful. It’s a good feeling isn’t it?”
He said, “Yes, that’s it! That’s how I feel. You know, someone told me life is just misery punctuated by hits of dopamine and the dopamine is what we call happiness. But really all we are doing is chasing dopamine hits to keep the misery at bay. But why does that have to be it? Can’t it be the other way around? I think it can. I think life is happiness with hits of misery in between. That’s what I think.”
Kid, I hope you always feel that way.
Love you!