The push and pull of New York City

(and the Knicks in Game 4)

As we drove back to Manhattan, there was a palpable shift at the city border, the air contracting again with energy in the way traffic patterns did, cars stacking against one another. We talked about the daunting task of driving in Manhattan, especially how impossible it seemed to merge lanes. My friend offers, “If you just start doing something, it will let you.” Faced with an impossible task, if you start doing something, it will let you. If you push, and you will have to push, there will be an equal reaction.

I’m not really talking about merging lanes.

During a summer where the Knicks are leading the NBA finals, the World Cup has just begun, the U.S. Open on its heels — after a particularly long winter — the city feels especially charged, a perpetual buzzing that has fused itself with the humidity slowly taking over the incipient summer days. It feels inevitable to write about the momentum of New York that has carried me in the 2.5 years I’ve lived here — sometimes in a soothingly rocking motion, sometimes as violently as waves crash, but always, always, in motion.

Specifically, there is a push and pull. New York can be a place that makes you feel fully in control of your decisions; who you spend time with and why — in a city unburdened by the whims of private transportation, in streets made for walking instead of driving, where your friends are so close to one another (or at least it feels that way) it can be spontaneous momentum yet intentional movement.

If you don’t push, you will be pulled. I caught up with a friend who said that even though she knew she was overextending, she couldn’t help but book out her weekends, filling every single moment with plans and tasks. There’s something exhilarating about running from one place to another, with no time to let things settle. There is only fly, pounce, and a buoyant hope that constant movement keeps you in vertigo.

Maybe there’s some analogy between basketball and merging lanes; Jalen Brunson says: “You’re allowed to think about the worst possible scenario but you gotta go out there and do something about it.”

This idea of “doing something” again.

Because even being pulled feels more right than standing still. Being in place feels like wasting time; no other city asks so much for change. It never feels enough to accept life as it is, but to continue looking for something more. On one hand, it can be a hedonistic treadmill. On the other, it is a forcing mechanism for improvement. In this one life, maybe it’s worth it?

How can it not be? You are pressed against strangers as the train sways back and forth, you speed walk across the road when the pedestrian light isn’t even on, you go on a run across the West Side Highway and dodge bikers that fly past you even faster. Central Park is verdant again, covered by checkered blankets and spring flowers, again. You are rushed from one cafe to a restaurant to a bar where you watch Ogugua Anunoby tip in the basketball in the final second of Game 4. Then you shoulder your way outside, taken under by a sea of orange and blue, and you think — how can I be anywhere that is not in motion? How can I not be compelled to do something in this city of everything?

Yet it is motion willing to pause, laugh at itself briefly, then go, again. I was riding the C train going downtown, and the sound system for the speaker was broken, warbling out directions as though one had inhaled from a balloon; a high pitched and inexplicably absurd sound carrying through a crowded train car. A brief pause of disbelief, we all look up from our devices, and a collective chuckle rings through.

A brief pause as the ball bounces on the rim, undecided if it will enter. Then, New York City explodes in a roar of joy.

If you start doing something, it will let you. And if you pause, it only gets better.