Where do you store your suitcases?
We just raised our beds a few extra inches. You would have thought Ed McMahon just showed up at our door with an oversized check (that one’s for you, Gen X!), we have been so giddy with our newfound storage
Suitcases and trumpet cases - you will no longer impersonate function-less furniture in our home! Be gone …
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Cocoa was a little less delighted but he adapted his vertical leap.
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After all, in New York City, it’s all about the vertical.
We live in a high-rise apartment building with a lovely rooftop terrace open to all residents. I go months forgetting it exists and when I remember/my daughter reminds me, I still resist hitting the up button in the elevator.
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Seriously, what is wrong with me?
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It's odd that enjoying this luxury requires habit tracker level intervention (yes, it's between fruit and flossing on my habit tracker). It’s like I used to resist baths as a stubborn kid (but then sometimes didn’t want the bath to end) and still resist making social plans as an introverted adult (but then sometimes don’t want the night to end).
Like a petty sibling, my present self sure does resist making my future self happy.
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When the habit tracker wins, it is worth it. Time, and my breathing, feels slower up there. I can see for miles.
I love the research on psychological distance which reveals how we think and act differently in response to things far from us versus close to us, whether that be in time, space, similarity, or even realism. Our minds are constantly processing proximity to self.
Things look far away and I feel my mind slip into “high level construal mode" - more oriented towards the pros and the why, less on the cons and the how. The distance feels nice.
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Everything is adorably small, like an urban Honey I Shrunk the Kids. Teeny little toy-like cars crawl through gridlock and zip through green lights and no doubt the drivers are probably honking while flipping someone off but it’s all just cute from afar.
If the wind is just right, I sometimes hear bagpipes from somewhere (I swear).
Not to mention a river and some boats and even a very famous park way off in the distance. This is cinematic stuff.
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Hollywood seems to agree. A lot of iconic movies have iconic scenes at the top of a cliff or building.
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Even better, sometimes a dad in my building is up there with his toddler and they “paint” the terrace using water as paint. Hollywood can't beat this kind of cue-my-tears moment. My heart expands to the size of the sun!
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That’s why my growingly self-sufficient family (hallelujah!) has come to expect that I disappear to that terrace each morning. The psychological distance and the slow time has fostered a lovely daily creative practice where I write "morning pages," read, and "draw" (ooooohhhhhh stay tuned - more about my creative journey to come in a future issue!).
If I do it right (which is to say, if I stay off my &%^*$# phone), the air feels breezy and so do my thoughts. I love it.
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I soak up the sun (and yes, I wear sunscreen, pre-shower, which is weird but that’s adulting for you) and I marvel at the vastness of a great city.
It is awesome. It is awe. Researchers have found that awe gives us a sense of a “small self” – like we are part of something larger than ourselves – and is often triggered by “perceived vastness” outside of our normal scale of experience. Science shows what we can feel ... awe is good for the body and the soul.
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Maybe when we feel smaller, we realize that life is bigger … just as the hit 90’s band REM told us (I recently learned that I have been mis-singing this lyric for several decades - am I the only one who thought it was “life is bitter” or maybe "life is better"? Doh!)
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More than graphs and tables
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When life is bigger, patterns are clearer. The big picture view from the roof reveals a lot about racial disparities. The roof offers a three dimensional systemic view that the graphs and tables of my academic ivory tower do not. Here is what I can see from there.
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I can almost see all five boroughs of New York City plus New Jersey and Long Island. There are economic differences visible from above and there are a lot more industrial-ish, polluting-ish type things in the areas where the average income and wealth is lower.
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Real estate is not accidental, as Richard Rothstein explains in The Color of Law. A redlining map is also a map of our biases, a map of the state of our schools, and even a map of asthma suffering.
Said another way, it’s a map of where the Sex and the City characters do (and don’t) live (yes, yes, in the original, not the reboot; yes, yes, before Charlotte moved to Brooklyn … lol we’re losing the thread here, folks). What feels normalized on the ground looks conspicuous and suspicious from way up high.
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I can also see where there are and aren’t trees throughout New York City. I have been reading research by urban forestry professor Ted Endreny about heatwaves and the disparities in green cooling services.
He and his colleagues have shown the phenomenal joint environmental, economic, and health benefits of trees in cities. The research and their i-Trees tools research suite are fascinating. Do trees grow in Brooklyn and beyond?
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The relative wealth of the suburbs is also on display from the commuting patterns I can see – cars flowing into the city in the morning and out of the city in the evening. The racial and economic segregation within and outside the city is hard to miss.
Speaking of suburbs and such, I'm excited to read Taffy Brodesser-Akner's new book, Long Island Compromise for its "hilarity, heartbreak, and smarts" (starred Kirkus Review) in this based-on-a-true-story about wealth, trauma, and suburbia. I still think about her amazing first book, Fleishman is in Trouble and the Hulu mini-series based on it.
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When I go vertical, I feel the breeze and slow the breathing. I see both my smaller self and the bigger systems. As a psychologist, I sometimes think too much about individual level phenomenon and too little about system level phenomenon (I've benefitted from work like this and this). From above, things are clearer.
Maybe there is room for some verticality in your life ... to raise your bed, head up to the roof, check out the view --- let me know what you see! Life is bigger, indeed.
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As always, I'm grateful we are growing together. Feel free to forward and post this email - links are below. We are on our way to 11,000 subscribers. Wouldn't it be amazing to grow our community to 15,000?!
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I'm off to organize my decadent under-bed storage. Be well!
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