When I was living in Chicago I was efficient; so efficient, in fact, that I barely have any memory of the place. A ten-minute walk -- often briskly executed, as my Apple Watch often tried to convince me to do -- connected my home and office; a trip of roughly the same distance in the opposite direction would take care of my grocery needs. Together, these two points defined the outer boundaries of my life, much like the walls of a fish tank, only this time the fish had volunteered to forgo the ocean.

    I had not started running back then, as running seemed to be the most painful way of unprofitably spending one's time -- you run in literal circles, always coming back to where you started, perpetually empty handed.

    Photography as a tool to train one's ability to be perceptive and observant hadn't yet occurred to me, as perceiving the liveliness of the street wasn't yet the inspirational imperative, and the vicissitude of different lives didn't yet have the power to enrich mine. Instead, by exclusively looking inward, I stared at the willfully constructed, false sense of comfort.

    "I must battle my desire to avoid a hassle. All important things in life are a hassle" said the director Hayao Miyazaki ¹. Important things always take work, but we must not let this pain-avoiding desire dictate our agenda. A perhaps mundane but familiar example is travel: Planning a trip is often troublesome, and the natural urge is to put off booking the flight as it seems to be the most prosaic activity there is, but a journey promises a massive payoff on the rather benign investment: the inevitable personal growth, and opportunities to create memories to be cherished for a long time, to name but a few.

    Smoothness really is want I took to mean efficient at that point of my life, as if the lack of impediment somehow implies some sort of mastery over my life. The polar ice sheet -- some of the most smooth landscapes on earth -- is barren, so is a frictionless life. Devoid of all the messy bumps and crevices as footholds, a climber will have troubles producing any upward motion.

    I wish I had lived by Chicago's magnificent lake shore, and commutted by bus or bike; I wish I had the habit of running, so I could be on more intimate terms with the city's glorious parks; I wish I had not lived so efficiently, so the bland transcation between Chicago and me would blossom into an intense encounter.

Chelsea, Manhattan. 07/2023