I moved to New York under an already biased pretense, dooming it from the start and allowing the dissatisfaction to continue creeping in as the months rolled on. Zach shared in the frustration too, which certainly fluctuated and at times was nearly invisible during our happiest days here, but in the end it was always a question of when, not if, we’d leave. Eventually that question mark preoccupied its attention to a matter altogether more cumbersome—the circumstances of our leaving. Picking a date on the calendar seemed trivial compared to the bigger unknowns. Where would we go? What would we do? Do we line up jobs now? Just leave and see what happens? Los Angeles? Seattle? Farther away? Graduate school was always on the horizon, languages are better learned in immersion and I’ve always meant to learn at least fifty-seven more, and my architecture degree was always more a suggestion than a prescription. Could we take what we’ve learned in our two years and eight months of living in New York and move forward, forging a new endeavor that is productive, fulfilling, and worthwhile? I’m not sure. But I don’t think anyone can ever quite be completely sure.
In fairness, it took three different stints of declaring we’d be “leaving in six more months” (which, admittedly, thereby prevented us from signing long-term leases or committing to long-term roommates), but it wasn’t until last November that we took the proper steps to ensure it would really happen later in the next year, later in June, later in the summer of 2015. At the time, we thought we’d be heading to mainland Japan. Teaching English, to be vocationally specific. But as plans sometimes go, curveballs are thrown and new plans need to be considered (and maybe old ones reconsidered), so in January we set to the task of asking ourselves what exactly it was we wanted out of this next move. Graduate school? We hadn’t applied, and I was nowhere close to knowing what I want to study. Maybe a new city and new jobs, but that didn’t exactly feel right either (besides, I had the best job I could probably ever ask for in Princeton Architectural Press). We didn’t want to travel in the conventional sense because the idea of hopping around from place to place with a backpack never appealed, and I’m the type to look for roots everywhere even if I don’t intend to put them down. What did we want?
Unpressured time. Some space to breathe, a chance to take a step back and evaluate where we’ve been and what we’ve done, and, most importantly, the introspection to really understand the whats and whys of the things we want to accomplish with our lives. We’ve experienced a lot in our years here—indeed I’ve held, and left, my first real job, and eventually found myself in a position that would have made college-me incredibly proud, but more valuably, a position that made me happy; for Zach that meant the realities of practicing architecture; and for us both it was the exposure to the East Coast Architecture School circuit and its dealings, presentings, and opportunities. All that experience has given us the stuff of life—material, fodder, joys and confusions and despairs—that we desperately want to make sense of before we get lost in the whirlwind. It has been difficult, a few instances much more than others, and I wonder sometimes if this departure is a sort of giving up, if maybe our collective skin just wasn’t thick enough. But in truth I don’t entirely buy that either. In truth, we didn’t feel right doing things without intention, pursuing careers and raises and promotions without really believing that we ourselves were in the positions to contribute to making the world a better place. Were we doing that, in our New York architecture firms and New York architecture book publishing houses? Maybe. But it wasn’t clear. What we looked for was meaning, and, in a humanistic sense, we looked for a sign that what we were doing in our jobs stood some chance of increasing another person’s happiness or reducing their suffering.
Of course, we don’t have the formula to find that straightaway. I had my hunches, hunches that I’d developed based on what was most important to me in architecture school, and I followed my nose to the places I sought employment. But I wonder now if it was right to seek that firstly and fore mostly in a job, which is what this entire stint in New York has represented—that is, being an employed, fully functioning, tax-paying adult. The answer is increasingly pointing to no, and at the same time it has become increasingly clear that the answer to this next step is to take a gap year. I’d taken to seeking advice from my greatest, smartest, most insightful friends (that is, consulting A Severe Mercy, The Little Prince, David Foster Wallace, C. S. Lewis, Milan Kundera, the Book of Life, Anthony Yue, Kierkegaard, Winnie the Pooh, Thich Nhat Hanh, and T. S. Eliot, all of whom were on varying levels of helpfulness) to get any closer to any kind of knowing.
That said, Zach and I are moving to New Zealand for about a year. Come this August 20th, we’re flying to Auckland, buying a car, and then driving around the country to find the place/s that makes sense (logistically, spiritually, happily) to call home. In that time, we’ll be applying to graduate schools here in the States (and perhaps north of the border and across the pond), working on personal projects, reading a lot, and, financially speaking, hoping to break as close to even as possible. The date draws very close, and we’ll be leaving New York well before that, so our heads are lately spinning with to-do lists, resignations, and telling loved ones of our plans over cups of coffee and telephone lines and, as you have just read, blog posts such as this one right here.
More soon.