Second city chance
I like second cities. I grew up in one. I live in one. Second cities try to punch above their weight. Second cities have something to prove. There is a hunger. There is a relaxedness to them. One does not need the best; one needs enough. The first city calls them unambitious as if that’s a diss. Everyone else calls them unambitious as if it’s a virtue. The food is always amazing. People eat well, live well, do their thing, fly under the radar, generally happy to be misunderstood.
For my entire life, there has been only one problem with Chicago, which is that winter exists. Chicago’s winter is bad enough to motivate people to move and never come back. Others say oh, you grew up there, you must love winter, and for this they receive the largest gasface that has ever been invented by humankind. I do not like winter. I am good at winter. I know how to layer, how to survive. I know resilience. I know when you need to take shelter. I know the point at which you should have no exposed skin. I know when to Instacart $100 of groceries and hunker down with that Netflix special you’ve always wanted to binge. This does not make winter good or fun. It makes winter managed.
Last November, in a car on the way to King Spa, I looked up the news, and discovered that a new variant of the stupid virus had logged on, someplace in South Africa, with something like 69 mutations to the spike protein, and transmissibility thrice that of the old ish. I calmly closed the tab, went into the Chase app, transferred some Ultimate Rewards points, and booked myself a one-way flight to Lisbon.
- Hey nickd, you’re quiet.
- Oh sorry, I just booked a flight to Portugal.
- What?
I had never been to Portugal before. What I knew of Lisbon came from Anthony Bourdain: fadó, tinned fish, non-tinned fish, ginja. And I also knew that they had the highest Juice rate outside of the UAE & Israel at the time. So, Portugal. There are worse fates.
I was correct to do this. Chicago effectively shut down the whole time I was out; nobody left their houses. I spent all of January living like a local, across from a cypress over two centuries old, so large that it sits on its own wrought-iron armature. I found an amazing butcher on day 2. I went to the farmer’s market in January, in defiance of god. I ate well, wandered the botanic gardens a few times a week, looked at plants. On quiet evenings, I would wander down to the waterfront, earbuds in, and contemplate life. A few people flew in to see me; I connected with many others over the course of the month. It was slow, patient, calm, open to connection. Sometimes I’d hit the natural wine bar a couple of blocks from me, only 8 seats, and talk about life with all the strangers who rolled through, dying softly in the sun.
I have no real connection to Portuguese culture, and Lisbon didn’t hit in the same way that others have, but I felt myself relaxing into a slower, more gentle life. I felt held. It felt enough.
At the beginning of the Bad Times®, I wrote in a weekly update for my close people that the biggest danger we face going forward is the puritanical cult of individualism that personifies the United States, which I believe to be a fundamentally incorrect way of organizing in civilized society. On one side of the spectrum, you have this country. On the other, you have, say, Japan. There is a vast spectrum in the middle, where many European nations reside.
And now, Chicago has grown to have a second fundamental problem, one more pernicious and illegible than the cold weather. Individualism has precipitated a degree of fractal societal collapse in the United States that doesn’t really resonate with my core values as a person. Chicago, of course, is not immune. I don’t think I need full-bore collectivism, but I need something more than this. On the other hand, if I left, I’d be abandoning everything I love, and everything I’ve come to know.
And that is where winter comes in.
I came back from Lisbon to run the important errand of throwing my 40th birthday party, and then I flew to Mexico City and a couple of remote parts of Costa Rica for most of February. In a small town 5 miles from the Panama border, I came up with the idea of text, and built the whole thing in a few days.
What shows up for me in this process is the idea of psychic spaciousness. I lived in Chicago for the entire duration of the Bad Times® – possibly even longer – feeling like a weight was on me. I found it hard to consciously envision the next thing. Traveling provided precisely the brain reset that I needed. It was good existing in solitude, in warm weather, with few obligations.
I want to capture that again.
The days are getting shorter, and I’m pretty sure I know where I’m going to end up. In the meantime, a flight has been booked, because that’s the hardest bit. Clarity is the hard bit. I figured it out. Now I know how to move. Probably another second city.