You can’t go home again. Again. I’m back home now, and I’m feeling something I haven’t felt since the last time I returned from a big trip.
Friday night I came in the door, dropped my bag, sat on the couch out of habit. Instead of the relief I had looked forward to from the plane, I felt an intense uneasiness. My apartment is clean, spacious, utilitarian and unlike New York City in every way, and to this moment it makes me queasy. It’s no wonder, either, that feeling so comfortable in the crowds of Manhattan (“like a warm bath,” I kept saying) I feel quite out of place in a city that is so starkly different, even if I do call it home.
What is a surprise, though, is that I’d been enduring some measure of this restlessness all the time without recognizing it. How to Always Have Something Better to Talk About Than the Weather. Six years ago, when I lived in a snowy mountain village and paid my bills by cleaning high-end sinks and toilets, someone said something that prompted me to confront an uncomfortable truth about myself.
A well-meaning coworker mentioned that she had been talking to another housekeeper about me. Oh? “She said, ‘David is a such great guy to work with, it’s just that he’s just so quiet.‘” I don’t remember how I responded, but I assume I tried to disagree somehow, and went back to my work hoping nobody would ever say that to me again. Quiet. I remember the rest of that day. “Maybe I don’t want to talk about what any of you want to talk about. My little internal rant echoed a common human pattern, though I didn’t see it at the time: When people feel inadequate in some way, they tend to make up whatever prejudices or beliefs they need to feel okay about it. Of course, nobody realizes it while they’re doing it. The Black Hole of Social Anxiety Silence seems to quickly become the smartest policy.
4 Brilliant Remarks From History’s Wisest American. If I have a hero, it’s Ralph Waldo Emerson.
He represents to me humanity’s potential: wise, self-reliant, honest, unencumbered by conformity, and able to enjoy every little detail of life as if they were all miracles. He possessed the hallmark of a human being ahead of his time: he was hailed as a genius and simultaneously reviled as a subvert. His views were radical for his era, but his wisdom could not be denied, even by his detractors. Even Herman Melville, author and professed Emerson-hater, later described him as “a great man.”
I am convinced that all of the secrets to personal peace and freedom reside within the ideas recorded in Emerson’s essays and lectures. Perhaps this is why he is so widely quoted and so scarcely read. It’s worth the effort. “People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of their character A person’s opinion of the world they live in really seems to be a foolproof litmus test for their strength of character. 5 things that always work and don’t cost anything. Most things don’t work.
Ever since my early twenties when I found myself inexplicably unhappy, I’ve been looking for things that work. Resolutions and experiments. Things to do. Quality of life is the only thing I was ever after. Not happiness exactly — because being happy all the time is impossible — but a day-to-day existence that creates it pretty easily. A lot of things seem to work for a while, but then wear off or have a different effect. I’m not claiming mastery of these five things that work. 1) Killing conspicuous silences What makes life good, more than anything, is other people. Alienation is born in uncomfortable silences. Violating it has. I do like silence, and I think sharing a good silence with someone you know can be empowering, but conspicuous silences do seem to be invariably harmful when you’re getting to know somebody. 2) Keeping everything clean Things are useless except for the experiences they can provide, prevent or improve. 3) Having a big thing on the horizon.