The slow sublime in a city unrushed

Is it possible to live a slow life in a big city? A meditation on subway travel and our relationship with time.

There’s a certain luxury in being able to ride the subway when you’re not in a rush. The luxury of not caring how crowded the train is during rush hour because you know that’s when to avoid it. The luxury of taking the extra 15 minutes to ride the local and not the express because you aren’t married to a schedule and there isn’t a particular time you need to be anywhere.

A move back to freelance means wild swings between twelve hour work days and suddenly becoming untethered to my computer. Hence, the long stretches of unscheduled time until the next project comes in—or—at all, as I anxiously wait to see if a contract even gets renewed (ah, see? All the madness and stupidity of federal cuts trickle down). In the meantime, I’ve taken the subway more times in the past two weeks than I have in the last three months combined.

In NYC, it's an unspoken rule that you don’t make eye contact with other commuters. In a crowded subway car where humans are piled on top of one another, eye contact, especially lingering and prolonged, feels too intimate. It breaks the imaginary bubble you project that you then want to fiercely protect. You take great pains not to touch another person’s fist clutching the pole just inches away from yours. It takes a certain level of hyper awareness to be this cognizant of protecting your own space while not encroaching on others. If you’ve been doing it all your life, it becomes second nature.

But I’ve also witnessed small cracks in that third wall. Like when a hand-scribbled note falls from an opened book and someone picks it off the floor to hand it back. Or our collective laughter when we strain to make sense of a garbled, staticky announcement. We look at each other as if to ask, wait, what did he say? Was it anything important? Except we don’t even have to say it out loud because the expression on the faces of your fellow New Yorkers can finish your thoughts if you’ve lived through enough shared experiences.

If you’re observant, you might witness serendipitous encounters: a follow on social exchanged between two flirtatious people; a long conversation sparked spontaneously among strangers. There’s usually an abrupt end to the chatter, sometimes mid-sentence, when one party realizes they’ve reached their stop. I always find it interesting that these two people, who shared this brief moment of connection, may never cross paths again.

And then there are the sobering moments when you come face to face with humanity in a way that forces you to confront the cruel realities of the world that you only otherwise see on the news. The sight of migrant children selling candy can break your heart. The slumped over body of a homeless man sleeping with his arms protectively wrapped around his possessions elicit a mix of emotions, some of which you aren’t proud to admit.

These are the things I notice when I’m not in a rush and start paying attention to things. The subway transports the rich, the struggling, the tourists, and the commuters. It’s a study in urban psychology, unwritten social rules in action, and the opportunity to witness the microcosm of the city itself—always hustling, always unpredictable. If you slow down and you’re receptive, the stories write themselves.

But to do so means pushing against the very pulse of how the city is wired. Is it possible to live a slower life in a city that’s built on speed and motion? On hustle and grind where everyone moves fast but talks faster? I’ve thought about this more deeply after watching over an hour of Christian Marclay’s The Clock recently at MoMA. I’ll admit that going in, I didn’t know much about the 2010 video installation (movie? montage?). The key thing to know is that the time displayed on-screen matches the actual time in the real world. Yes, the piece is 24 hours long and when a clock on-screen shows that it’s 11:07 A.M., it is indeed synchronized to your local time.

Meticulously edited from thousands of quick-fire clips taken from movies and television that reference time, there is no formal narrative, but our brains instinctively try and thread together connections from one scene to the next. Clocks and watches are the central visual theme and it’s as much a journey through cinematic history (the lack of non-white faces in our film and television history is painfully glaring) as it is about our hyper-awareness of time.

Sometimes, my life feels at odds with this fixation on time because my days aren’t ruled by a clock. It feels strange to move at an unhurried pace while the rest of the city moves fast. We’ve cultivated the so-called “principles” of slow living here in Brooklyn—not intentionally to chase after some hashtag trend, but because we’re more than fine with slow and boring now that we’re older. We cook our own food and even grow some of it ourselves, housed under grow lights indoors and on our Brooklyn balcony. I no longer care about going out in the evenings. Instead, I look forward to a nightly date with my couch and my cat who contracts himself into a loaf with limbs tucked in, sitting on our laps like a paperweight.

So if I can do that anywhere, why do it here? What does it say that I crave quiet and stillness, which is as much of a paradox as any when I live in one of the most densely and populated cities in the world? This is a perennial topic of conversation among New Yorkers. We love to endlessly debate it, but when spring rolls around, winter fades into distant memory as we surrender again to the buzz and hum of city life. If January and February is all about hibernation, then March is about emerging from it.

Recently, a heavy rainstorm swept through the city—the kind that relentlessly pelted against our windows all night. I imagined it power washing away the winter grime, taking with it all the stubborn layers of salt left behind by months of snow and ice. When I woke up the next morning, the city looked like it had gone through a deep clean. A few days later, the temperatures rose 10-15 degrees and that was all the signal I needed.

I’m rejoining my fellow New Yorkers as I obsessively check the time again for train schedules that will get me to my destination. Suddenly, I feel an urgency to meet with friends, visit museums, march in a protest, and satisfy cravings of pastries and frothy lattes.

We moved our clocks forward last weekend. At 6:15 P.M on a Monday evening, I descended down the stairs to the underground lifeline of the city and rode the subway to an event in Sunset Park. It was still gloriously light out.

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Related reading

A lesson in spontaneity as I wander NYC

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A roundup of links

To read:

• Parallel Practice: How to Break a Sentence (The Rumpus)
  A writer uses embroidery as a representation of the abstract nature of sentences.

• The Illustrated Envelopes of Edward Gorey (The Paris Review)
  Can you imagine receiving these letters in the mail? Swoon.

• How Science Can Adapt to a New Normal - In the wake of attacks on the research enterprise, scientists need to focus on protecting its fragile infrastructure. (Undark)
  Yes, I’m worried about the future of science in our country. And not a great time to have two STEM college kids who are waiting to hear about summer research grants.

• Researchers develop recyclable plastic that fully dissolves in the sea (Designboom)
  Speaking of brain drain, research and innovation will shift outside the U.S.

• When is it time to have the courage to quit? (NPR)
  Also related: what is the right ethical choice? Sticking it out or leaving an impossible situation?

An exhibition worth seeing if you’re in NYC:

• Christian Marclay’s The Clock, referenced above, through May 11th. (MoMA).
  A related read: I Spent 24 Hours Watching The Clock. There was a special viewing where you could reserve to watch the entirety of all 24 hours. As much as I was engaged in the piece (I stayed way longer than I thought I would—and observed that most viewers stayed a while too) I think I would go crazy by the end of it.

To watch:

• We recently rewatched the entirety of Lost (Netflix). Can a show about airplane crash survivors stranded on a remote island be a comfort show? Oddly for me, yes. It brought me back to my baby days, and later, jumping on Twitter as soon as an episode ended so we could all collectively go WTF was that cliffhanger? It might be the first ever “social media” show. Can’t believe it’s 20 years old—and btw, it totally holds up.