Vienna, Austria.  I’m craving a good conversation, and I’ve got New York on my mind. The Viennese, I’ve come to realize, don’t do chats. Viennese conversations with strangers, while perfectly polite, are purely transactional. Ask one question, you get one answer.  (In fact, Viennese conversations with foreign-looking strangers don’t even reach the transactional level.  A woman at the grocery store ran away from me today.  But that’s another story. . .)

New York chats, on the other hand, are anything but aseptic. Ready or not, New Yorkers will weave their personal lives into the most impersonal of topics. Do what you wish out of this unrestrained (often TMI) openness. A recent overheard conversation captures it all:

Waitress: It’s better to drink tepid water.
Customer: What’s tepid?
Waitress: Lukewarm, like i how I feel about my husband.

Ah, New York. So special. 🙂 New Yorkers are open books with anybody willing to listen. Accustomed to being ‘polite’ and respectful of other people’s personal space, most outsiders would cringe at this overexposure. In most parts of the world, the norm for ‘proper’ conversation, particularly with strangers, remains within the boundaries of the “safe topics” — the weather, where we went, what we did. Consequently, interactions are sterile and forgettable. I would add that when dialogue is limited to how great things are going and what achievements we’ve accomplished, the result is boredom. Alain de Botton, in his School of Life series, says that for meaningful conversations to occur, one should have the courage to go beyond the facts, and venture into the uncomfortable territory of feelings, vulnerabilities and failures.

Maybe it’s the small living spaces that force New Yorkers to make a living room (or therapist office) out of the entire city, or maybe it’s a certain loneliness that makes us seek connections. But New Yorkers frequently and willingly dive headfirst into this uncomfortable territory de Botton speaks of.  A woman in my morning commute asked for a tylenol and regaled me with stories of the ex-boyfriend she had met up with the previous night; another woman crossed a crowded subway car to ask for my stylist’s contact details and told me about the fight she had with hers; the cashier at the grocery store recounted the emergency call she got from her son’s school about her son’s antics.

Of course, this rawness does not always lead to pleasant encounters (such as getting kicked out of cabs, or unwanted advances). But if we do not instantly reject these encounters, and instead, remain open to them and what they can offer, this lack of censorship can forge profound connections, even for a tiny moment. Contrary to what we’ve been taught about “polite conversations”, de Botton proffers that people actually appreciate being shown others’ failures and vulnerabilities. This has less to do about wanting to see others fail, and more about wanting to know that we are not alone in our struggles. Knowing “that our own sorrows have echoes in the lives of others” is what connects us.

After a particularly difficult breakup, I took a lunch breather at one of the benches in Rockefeller. A middle-aged man in shorts and sneakers, with elegant salt and pepper hair, sat next to me. After some silence, he casually mentioned he used to work in the area but quit the law profession to try his hand at entrepreneurship. We got to conversing; I prodded a little more about his life. He mentioned his wife had divorced him.  He went through a tough period, he recalled, but is in a much much better place. He then said, “Look it all boils down to this: we all just have to relax. Life has a way of working out.”

If we find the courage to bring our conversations to new depths, we may be pleasantly surprised.  Even in a large, impersonal city such as New York, we are offered countless opportunities to discover that at the other end of the dialogue is a person with the same struggles as we do — of finding an apartment, of finding love, of finding solace, of making it here. Through these meaningful conversations readily available at any corner grocery or park bench, the city becomes our surrogate family. It consoles us, uplifts us, encourages us, makes us feel less alone, and effectively makes itself enormously difficult to leave.

 

I would love love love to hear your thoughts.  Drop me a line in the comment section below. 

I made my first solid step out of NY this morning; I told my landlord I was breaking my lease. So today, I walked around the city feeling quite unmoored. What if I hate the cities I move to? What if I never find a good apartment again? What if? What if what if?

I entered the subway and took a seat. In front of me was a young man with a large sketch pad on his lap. He asked, “Can I draw you?”

I looked around, then looked back at him. He was looking at me. I shrugged, “Sure.”

We chatted a tiny bit as he drew. I told him I was from the Philippines but had been in NY for a long time. He said he had been drawing for a long time. The train crossed the Manhattan Bridge. He asked, “Do you want me to draw the view behind you?”

“No,” I said.

I watched as he proceeded to draw the view behind me — the Brooklyn Bridge, Chinatown. “I drew it anyway,” he said.

“That makes a nice going away present then,” I said. He didn’t ask me what that meant.

He then turned to complete the lower part of my portrait, hand rapidly sketching out my hair, my shoulders, and stuff around my shoulders. “I gave you wings,” he said.

“Wings??” I asked, hair on my arms standing. (Some of you may know that wings hold a special meaning for me, hence the name of this blog).

“You know, like Victoria Secret model wings,” he said defensively. He paused. Then continued, “But the message really is: Be Fearless.”

I smiled, and threw a side-wink of thanks up to the universe.