Month: October 2014

This is New York. A city that can be at once deeply familiar but also newly restless on the same block. A city whose very material for being is serendipity. A giver of anonymity and a giver of the densest participation in humanity. And still, with all its gifts, it requires only one thing of us: utility. The only thing New York requires of its citizens, its tourists, its commuters, its passerbys, its participants, is to use the city. The only thing one cannot do in New York City is embrace it with apathy.

This is New York. We come here unfinished, looking to the city for answers, for solitude, assignment, and for reward — looking for someplace to finish our sentences. And the city, in turn, presents endless possibilities. No matter if one lives here a year or a life, if utility is the city’s aspiration, then its reward is its neighborhoods.

Recently, I moved — all of 1.8 miles. After 11 years in one Brooklyn neighborhood, I moved just over 9,500 feet to the east. New Yorkers live and breathe by the people and services on a single city block, so moving this far is just as well moving countries. Changing currencies. Allegiances. Time zones. But without sympathy. Because it is, after all, still one city.

When I moved from the East Village of Manhattan to Brooklyn, I saw neighborhoods unlike I’d seen before. “The city,” as Manhattan is called if one is a Brooklynite, has neighborhoods of course. Yet Brooklyn has them at a different scale and speed. Within a month of moving to Carroll Gardens, I’d been offered protection, welcome-baked-goods, and was head of some sort of block-party planning committee. In more than a decade there, I’d been locked out, delighted, broken into, loved, infuriated, and everything in between. And I relied on the people on my block to be there for me through it all.

I now live on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn — the kind of Grand Central of our borough — where the steady traffic and sirens are a nightly lullaby. It’s no pastoral neighborhood, but the frenetic diversity of pace, scale, sounds, lights, and people to befriend envelops one in possibility. It’s less bake sale more survivalism, less Hopper more Pollack. Invitations to help and dine together are frequent, and neighbors hang even closer together. Islands of neighbordom against the fray. With neighbors, anything is possible.

This is a city I came to with aspiration, and a city I return to aspiring to be inspired again. Of all the cities, it may be New York who is the most unflappable, the most infallible, the most impenetrable, but the most loyal and the most forgiving. As such, it is New York City itself who is unfinished, its unkempt seams and its unsmooth asphalt, its uptown arts and its devoted downtown, living undone, side by side.

This is New York. A city of neighbors making the unfinished finished.
It’s been spat on and praised, paved over and cheered on. It needs us to finish its sentences. For despite all of the promised anonymity of this singular city, “New York City” is plural.

In his unending wisdom, author Umberto Eco reminds us that there is wisdom in what is not done, wisdom in what is not finished.

Eco is allegedly the owner of a large personal library of 30,000 books, and separates visitors to his library into two categories: 1) the large majority who visit asking “how many of these have you read!?” — the impressed — and 2) those — a very small minority — who get that books are not for show, but for research. And that unread books are far more valuable to us than read ones.

As such, our personal libraries should contain as much of what we don’t know as what we do. They should contain the possible. The aspirational. They should contain the future.

In other words, the unfinished is far more valuable than the finished. The un-figured out far more valuable than the figured out.

Eco called this concept the anti-library.

People don’t walk around calling themselves anti-entrepreneurs or promoting their anti-CVs. We don’t promote our anti-knowledge and our anti-degrees. But maybe we should.

The love of books is much celebrated; the love of reading too. Yet the love of not reading — the letting of books pile up around us — is a quiet pursuit.

Let’s celebrate the stories of people we thought we’d once be; stories of languages we thought we’d once learn; places we thought we’d once visit; hobbies never learned; pursuits never pursued. These need not be stories of what wasn’t, but stories of what was instead.

Let’s celebrate books owned, but never read. Pages unfolded. Chapters unfinished. Marginalia unwritten.

And celebrate lives lived.

If there is one thing I’m absolutely expert at, it’s not finishing projects. I am a serial starter, an absolutely fantastic middle-of-the-project doer, and an expert project quitter. I know when to quit. And I do.

I’ve quit gardening. I’ve quit German, the language, entirely. I’ve quit living in Japan. I’ve quit knitting and French Horn lessons. 

In fact, if there is anything that has been successful in my life, it’s been the ability to recognize the need to quickly jettison a project, an idea, a thing, and move on.

But until recently, I kept this a secret. Somehow, while our design processes celebrate iteration and throwing things away, our culture scorns switching and quitting. We don’t celebrate stopping things, changing our paths, or our minds. Just the opposite. We celebrate finishing things.

We’re so busy tracking completion — how many miles run, books read, calories burned, cities visited — that we forget to remember a project’s value in the first place. In our race just to finish, we underestimate the benefits of quitting. I want to come out of the unfinished project closet. I want to consider the benefits of starting.

Despite my dozens of inactive blogs, unrealized side projects, and fallow domain names, next week, I start (another) new side project. And thus begins another new possibility for uncertainty, for quitting, and for happiness.

I’m ready.