I did not live in the realm of space and time, which meant I was perpetually tardy to meetings, both for work and social activities. When I was in the city streets, I partly jogged to get where I was going. I was on a mission, and there was nothing I cared about besides getting to my destination. In my early twenties living in Manhattan, I functioned like this for two years. It was a sort of tunnel vision.
It wasn’t until I moved to Taiwan that I gave myself permission to tread slowly. I had less to do. Even though Taipei was a capital city, life was unhurried; we were on an island, after all. In the slowness, I was sinking into the granularities of life. I remember noticing the way light fell through the branches of a tree, and the web of a spider resembling intricately woven silk. I remember brief daily encounters with my neighbor, a seventy-year-old grandfather who fed me bananas every time he saw me. I recall the wide eyes of a baby and that stare of innocence and purity, like two full moons gazing back at me.
In the slowness, my feelings amplified. The softer I walked and the less fixated on my destination, the more the world was about the moment I was in. A few times when I was walking to work, I strolled right past it because I was so entranced by my surroundings. Taipei was not the most aesthetic city I had visited, but my state of attention made me notice the lovely little things.
Instead of clubbing, watching Netflix, or hanging out with friends, in my free time, I would walk alone aimlessly. I’d leave my phone at home and allow myself to be guided by the invisible force of curiosity. I carried this practice back to New York and realized how much my approach to life had metamorphosed. I was what the French would label as a Flâneur.
The etymology of the word Flâneur is from the Old Norse verb flana, "to wander with no purpose." This is the artist or poet archetype who walks idly, observing life around him with nowhere to really go. He is a passionate spectator of the metropolis and is not the busy doer frantically going from one place to the next. He belongs to nowhere. He is meant for everywhere.
I embodied this archetype, absorbing the subtleties of my environment in an intense state of witnessing. One summer day in the Lower East Side, I left my phone at my apartment and roamed the urban streets. I was pulled by a jazzy tune coming from Thompson Square Park. I followed the music, as it demanded.
Junkies and crackheads sat on the cement looking up at a homeless John Coltrane. He stood like a king on top of a seven-foot pile of wood chips, this beautiful black man playing the saxophone.
He was beautiful in a non-obvious way as he was filthy from homelessness. His body was lean, and his six-pack gleamed with sweat. His yellowed eyes were intelligent and kind, and he had a playful swagger. He held his instrument like a trophy; it looked like an ornament of his body. I loved the notion of a man having nothing but his saxophone. I liked the dedication to art above food, above a home, above all else.
I sat on a bench and closed my eyes to meditate to the music. There was a huge smile on my face and the August sun on my skin. I was transported back in history to the 1950s in Harlem drinking a scotch on the rocks. I returned to a time where music was about the intensity of feeling, and not the mind-numbing futility of pop that was ever-present today.
The jazzy music got louder and louder. I opened my eyes, and there the homeless Coltrane was in front of me. We held steady eye contact, and he smiled as he continued to play. “He’s serenading you, little lady,” said an old junkie sitting on a patch of grass to my left.
The song ended, and all the junkies applauded. He asked me my name and introduced himself as “Smoky.” He told me he had played the saxophone since he was a child; he just couldn’t stop. It was his dharma. Smoky said he was going to grab a beer, and we hugged goodbye.
I walked onward and thought this state of openness could only happen to a Flâneur. I was glad to be someone with enough humility to give myself to what is and be set on nothing. New York City had changed into a place of poetic beauty, but really it hadn’t. It only appeared to change because I was finally receptive to what was always there. In the city of hustlers and the grind, I now walk slowly.
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