New York City and Making it Anywhere

New York City, February 2024

Writing this in my new home of London, the past season has been marked by farewells and hellos. A chapter closing to make way for the next. Having lived in New York City for six years of my twenties, there is a universal experience shared amongst people who have called this concrete jungle home. It would not feel fitting to delve into a new city without a proper homage to the previous one.

New York is carpe diem personified, but exponentially raised to another power. Seize the day, before the day seizes you. Hustle. Challenge yourself. Try something new. Fail. Try again. Improve. Try the next thing. Rinse and repeat. Keep reaching. Bend, bend, bend but don’t break. If you can make it to the end without breaking then you’ve truly made it, and as they say - if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.

The irony of having left the city is that I realize how much of an energetic forcefield it was, even in moments of rest. But for that very reason - the growth experienced was profound. Growth comes from risk taking and accepting challenge. For those seeking a self-challenge, this is the city for it. Sitting on the other side of the Atlantic, I find myself wondering - why do we think of life as a constant challenge, and glorify a city for being so difficult to thrive in? The same way we glorify victory in battle, because it results from personal skill and bravery surpassing external threat and difficulty. Wearing scars as badges of honor. The more experiences had and the harder they’ve been, the more we applaud. Is this why New York is such a laudable city?

We are presented various opportunities and along the way, we meet people who challenge us in various ways. Because the people this city attracts all want a challenge. We take the challenge of New York and raise it one, gamifying the city to a round of Chutes and Ladders. The climb. The career. The connections. The breadth of experience. If not fought for and attained despite all odds, it’s nothing to write home about. Nobody comes to New York satiated.

But what does this do to our mindsets? We eye each new project or person who enters our orbit as a new challenge. But the unspoken connotation within the word challenge is that we must in turn go to war with ourselves. We seek challenges because we are seeking something more. A personal victory. Glory within the struggle. And the attainment of that next level requires an inner transformation.

This is the New York of our 20s - a place we come to eager eyed, setting our sites on the highest peak, the tallest skyscraper, and telling ourselves that this is the point we’ll one day arrive at. Cascade over, even. Climb we did. Ran. Fast and hard. To that peak point that at one point was a small blip in the sky, and then one day, it became eye level.

The understandings we developed about ourselves from the people we met, who would challenge us in countless ways. These were all just cues, guides whispering to us to keep going further inward. Go a layer deeper. Discover more about yourself. We think we spent most of our time exploring New York, but in fact, New York was pushing us to explore ourselves.

The exploration of that inward point never truly ends. The point keeps shifting - the higher our vantage point brings us to, the newer sights we are able to visualize and target. And the deeper we can penetrate within our own selves, we see there is an untapped layer newly discovered. The more we climb - the further we unravel - the more peaks and depths we are able to see.

That we could bend in ways we didn’t realize - and yet, we didn’t break. Malleability driven by experience and growing confidence. That we were, in fact, delusional enough to believe we could. And in the end, we did.

It isn’t just the highs that come from promotions or upgraded apartments. It’s the people we met. Because this is the core of what makes New York what it is - everyone has come here in search of something. We can all provide a list of people we have met in New York City that runs pages long - but within the expansive nomenclature, we remember the ones who marked us. The ones we never imagined would walk into our lives  - or did we walk into theirs? Because New Yorkers are constantly in motion, and it’s the collision between two forces that brings those connections we might not always have anticipated. Some predictable, others unexpected. All part of the fabric of our New York story.

But as life continues evolving, so do we. There always comes a point to hop off one ride and onto the next - something we all must contend with at varying intervals in our lives. The courage required to make that pivot is sometimes strong enough to cascade over the fear of wondering what new tides will bring.

New York challenges us to give it everything. In turn, it promises to be dazzling. And dazzling it was. May the power we found in this city continue to propel us in every new one to come.