The Uses of Sorrow

I walked a little over 16,000 steps yesterday after landing in Chicago for a friend’s wedding this weekend, which is probably 15,000 more steps than I’ve taken willingly in the last 6 months or so. I’m not sure why this city has always had that effect on me, or why I’ve been so lethargic lately, but as I found my way to the lakefront from my hotel with my buddy Watson I started to feel like myself again in a way I don’t think I have in a good long while. Maybe it was revisiting the way the highrises here sardine themselves in between the streets like they’re afraid of being left behind, or the pungent clarity of being lost in an endless crowd, but the namelessness that came with my re-inclusion in the commute made it impossible not to feel alive.

I told an old therapist once that my life stopped making sense to me after I moved away from here, and my 4 hour walk along the lakefront and through the brick and mortar forest of the near North side seemed to underline that particular sentence from the self-explanatory journal I had been writing with her at the time. But buried beneath the comparatively more prosaic awareness I have now that this sort of emotion is just the table stakes for aging into adulthood, yesterday I found the brighter, more undeniable ache that comes with the passage of time. Or maybe said more honestly, the passage of my time.

I was at a birthday party last week and a woman there twice my age asked me what I was doing with my life these days. I told her I wasn’t sure because I don’t even know who I am anymore, and she said it was incredible I would admit that out loud to someone I just met. I told her it didn’t feel incredible, but I thanked her for the kind words if that’s what they were and asked her if she had any advice. The short version is she thinks I’m going to be just fine, and I promised her I would do my best to believe it.

I think I do believe it, but something I believe even more is that I probably don’t miss this city so much as I miss who I was when I lived here. There is nothing wonderful, at least in a classical sense, about being 24 and too broke to think past the coming weekend. But there is an undeniable beauty in feeling like a bullet being shot out of a gun and the reckless insistence on the existence of a target that comes with it. And as I was rummaging around today for something to soothe the ache I had, and will always have, for the wounds this city gave me all those years ago I stumbled across this Mary Oliver poem I’ve already read too many times to keep track of. It helped, as it always does, and I hope you find something in it as well. Happy weekend.