By Monday It Was Gone
- 2 days ago
- 3 min read
FIELD NOTE NO. 01
Bayswater, London — 2015
There is one evening from my London years that I keep returning to. I was in my late twenties, working in real estate finance, and I had come home late on a Friday after one of those weeks I could no longer distinguish from all the others. I poured a glass of whisky, put on a Billie Holiday record, and sat at the window of my flat, looking out at the wet Bayswater Road, watching the red double-decker buses pass Hyde Park and the lights coming on across the city.
And for a few moments, something opened. The music, the rain, the city life going on below me. All of it was suddenly enough. And somehow, I knew that it would always be enough, no matter what was happening in my life. It was like touching something beneath all the hustle and worry that was untouched by it.
I remember a feeling that I can only call wonder, as if I was being reminded of something I had known and forgotten. Just knowing that this existed gave me a profound sense of relief. I did not have language for it then. I just sat there and let it happen.
By Monday it was gone, and I was back at my desk, and the week began again.
What I did over the following years, without ever deciding to, was try to hunt that feeling down. I spent my days in spreadsheets and investor meetings and my evenings in galleries and at the opera. I studied art history after work and went to concerts. Some of these experiences touched that same place. A painting would open it, or a piece of music, or a landscape in the English countryside. But it always faded.
From the outside, none of this was visible. My life was working and my career was moving. My calendar was full of things that many other people would have wanted to be doing. But there was a subtle feeling running underneath it that something essential was missing.
I was living about one step removed from my own life, in the planning of it, the assessment of it, the comparing of it. And the sense of wonder and aliveness does not survive at that distance.
That is the part that took me a decade and a different continent to fully understand. The window had not changed. The record was familiar; I had played it fifty times. They were doorways, but they were not the source of what I felt. What was different that evening was that I had, for once, arrived where I already was. In the present moment. It was what I would now call grace, something that cannot be forced. The wonder was not in the experience. It was in the direct contact with life as it is.
I do not think we lose our capacity for wonder. I think it remains intact, all of it, waiting behind parts of us that are scared to stop and feel, and a nervous system that has learned to stay on guard. That is a hopeful thing to believe, and so far, nothing in my own experience has contradicted it.
What I have been exploring since that evening is not how to find more of these moments. It is what allows me to be available when they come.
