Happy Fourth of July, my fellow Americans! Happy just-another-day-in-July to the rest of you. I can’t remember the last time I actually celebrated the holiday in any way. I’ve been abroad for over six years now and whether I like it or not, my connection to America gets thinner and thinner. At this point, I mostly just identify as ‘other.’ Being an assimilator feels like my super-power, just drop me into a city and I can more or less figure it out. I’m not saying it’s easy; that’s beside the point, but it’s not as hard as most people would tend to think. Moving around as much as I do, my sense of belonging is spread amongst various places. That maybe sounds sadder than it is. What I mean is more that when you belong everywhere, you belong anywhere. And is there a more American sensibility than that?!
You know that old saying, if you're tired of London (or Paris, or Amsterdam, or New York, or Boston, or or or...), you're tired of life. It's attributed to Samuel Johnson, a writer in Enlightenment-era England who believed that the city was "the school for studying life," and that no true intellectual would dare to live elsewhere. I wouldn't disagree. I'm a city person, through and through, I've come to accept it and own it.
Yet it will not in the least endear me to you if I say that I often take life in Paris for granted. You may be offended to learn that I'm not bounding through every farmer's market, or cycling along the Seine with a baguette under my arm, or packing baskets laden with extravagant cheeses and fine wines to picnic under the Eiffel Tower. I mean, at least not as often as I probably should. No, most of the time, my big excursion for the day is walking to and from the Monoprix, working out what I can make for dinner that will take less than thirty minutes to throw together.
Because the truth is, sometimes you are tired of life. Sometimes you just want things to be easy or mundane or even boring. Sometimes you just want to be.
This is something I reflected on while I was back in Amsterdam, surprised by how much I'd missed the pleasant mundanity of Dutch life. Of course Amsterdam is well-equipped as a dynamic Western European capital: it's got culture, history, society, sex, drugs, rocknroll, etc. All mod cons. There is always something to do. But as far as day-to-day life, it's ideal for when you don't want to do much of anything at all.
The quality of life in Amsterdam is indisputably high. The human scale of the city and the predominance of bikes over cars, the liberal-mindedness, and of course the picturesque beauty of its tall crooked houses leaning over the canals, dotted as they are with their romantic bridges and glowing lanterns. There isn't much hustle and bustle, there’s no tension of a daily grind. The pace is steady, the vibes chill. It's a family-oriented culture, and most socializing happens in the home or in one of the city's many parks. Once your skin is sufficiently thickened to endure the characteristic 'directness' of Dutch interactions, it's an easy place to just be.
Don't get me wrong, Paris is the love of my life. I am never not in awe of it, its grandeur and its chaos. It challenges me, and you know how I love a challenge. I think the motto of the city might actually be: Paris, il s'exige! or, Paris, it demands!, because that's what it does. It demands your engagement. It gets in all up in your face. It grabs you by the collar and pulls you up. And sometimes, when you find yourself descending into laziness and complacency, that's exactly what you want, to be stirred into action. Paris will wake you the fuck up and make sure you’re paying attention.
It's a non-insight to say that you don't know what you've got til it's gone, which is really just another way of looking at the idea of the grass always being greener that I was writing about a few weeks ago. I am forever trying to square my desire for a slow, calm, settled existence with the restless current of energy that courses through me wherever I am. To say that this restlessness makes it hard to stay in one place is the understatement of a lifetime–well, my lifetime, anyway. It's not to be mistaken with wanderlust, which is too lovely of a word to describe my specific brand of agita. I'm always thinking of my next move, literally and figuratively, and once I make it, I inevitably look back with some longing for where I was before, and the cycle begins again. Thus, I am resigned to exist in a permanent state of unsettledness. C'est la vie.
It's not without acute self-awareness that I lament what boils down to a lifestyle choice, even though it can feel sometimes like it's chosen me, a ferris wheel I can't seem to hop off. But, as I am also aware, "it's distinctly possible to stay too long at the fair." How long can I keep this up, this endless moving and shifting, this neurotic tug-of-war between the life I have and the life I want? But then it occurs to me that it's distinctly possible that I'm asking the wrong questions.
Last summer, when I was immersed within my self-styled curriculum of studying writing craft, Lisa Cron's Story Genius became a useful handbook for understanding story structure, and how I might go about doing the background work necessary to construct a compelling narrative. Nevermind that I was writing about my own life and self. According to Cron, one of the core elements of character-building is to uncover the deeply-rooted misbelief that constantly foils a character's attempt to get what she wants.
"What is a misbelief, exactly? It’s the same thing as a belief, only it’s wrong," Cron writes. "The point is, a misbelief feels identical to a belief that’s spot on. That is, it feels right, not to mention true." Sometimes misbeliefs are fears, sometimes they are things we learned or heard from someone in our lives, sometimes they are imposed by society. However a misbelief may have originated, an aspect of our worldview has been fractured, toppled, as Cron says, and replaced with this false truth.
There are things that I often take for granted out of over-familiarity, whether it's the comfortable pokeyness of life in Amsterdam, or the fact that I can hop on the metro and be at the Louvre in fifteen minutes, though I never actually do. But there’s a second meaning to taking something for granted, and it makes me think of the funny malapropism, to take for granite: the assumption that something is fixed, true without question. In other words, a misbelief. These ideas aren't so different when you think about it; both are a kind of failure of imagination.
Somewhere along the way, I developed the misbelief that if I didn't engage with every opportunity on offer, I was essentially piling up unlived lives like the skeletons lining the catacombs. I have been taking for granite the belief that to take things for granted is equivalent to wasting potential, that most nefarious bugbear for someone who wants to do all the things and live all the lives in all of the cities. I have been taking for granite the belief that a person can only live in one place, can live only one way at a time.
Our misbeliefs are limiting beliefs that in turn limit the choices we see as possible for ourselves. The failure of imagination becomes a failure of confidence in our ability to create the life that we want. But why should we settle for 'either/or' when there is always the possibility of 'yes, and...' Calm and exigent. Steady and peripatetic. Amsterdam and Paris.