POV: Between.

POV ("point of view") is a series that addresses many of the same themes covered in my Equals Record column: growing up, saying yes to adventure, learning to embrace a quarter-life crisis. While my previous column focused largely on ideas, POV focuses on moments - glimpses, glances, tiny stories. 

It was warm in New York City last Wednesday. Warm enough to forgo a coat, to notice the absence of burning ears when going hat-less, to skip the subway and walk instead. The snow and black ice caking the edges of the pavement melted, leaving a mess of long-buried curiosities — tattered mittens, passport photos, mismatched table legs — thawing curbside in the sunlight.

  

Everyone, it seemed, was out, greeting one another as if reuniting after decades. “I thought you’d moved!” one familiar face said to me as I took a seat at a coffee shop ten minutes from my apartment. After I explained that I’d been working from home on especially cold days, he nodded his understanding, gesturing to the crowd that had gathered to bask in the light of the shop’s large windows. “And now we’ve all re-emerged,” he said.

The next day, I was back in my coat, but it was no matter. Between-seasons is my favorite time of year, and the transition from winter to spring — with its gray light, its slow undressing — is particularly alluring. Everyone’s eager to see the sun, of course, but there’s beauty in the interim, too.

“It’s an interesting challenge,” someone said to me recently, speaking on a topic completely unrelated to the weather, “to wait.”

I’ve found that, too — especially at this point in life, amid mounting pressures to get places quickly, to cross things off lists, to accomplish things I’m not sure are meant to have a timeline. I’ve found my senses are most finely tuned when I’m forced to let things be — and in times of transition, there’s so much to be lost (or missed) in the rush to get to whatever’s next.

Remembering this has kept me happy ten weeks into a year that’s already proven wildly unpredictable. So much so that life — in spite of its flightiness and uncertainty and its long, frozen winters — feels calm, and when an old acquaintance greeted me at a party recently by asking, “what’s good?”, I only had to say: “everything.” 

--

You can find my previous POV entries, here. Thanks so much for reading, as always.