Well hello, Happy New Year to all. I’ve given up resolutions, but here’s a little reflection on the kind of resolution you make without saying it out loud, sometimes because there are no words for that kind of yearning.

The last time I moved to Paris, I had just turned 26 and wore the city differently. I was moving so fast – everything was additive. There were always more layers of a life that got bigger and broader every year: more friends in more countries, then a partner, more work, and more responsibility. It was a technicolor river streaming around and past me, heading for a horizon that never seemed to get any closer oh, how I loved that. There was an overnight sleeper car to Barcelona where they knock on the door to offer lovers trays of morning espresso; there was interviewing Olympic gymnastic coaches in Hungary where I towered, an American Gulliver watching a line of four-year-old girls hopping along training beams just inches from the floor like a tiny army of sparrows. And there was snowmobiling in the dark of day near the Arctic Circle in Sweden and beers after midnight with a beautiful, doomed Australian rock star and his band amid the gentle pink buildings of Toulouse. It was a moveable, dizzying feast.

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And always, I came home to Paris and my strange little apartment in the Marais. We slept in lofts you could only reach by ladders with rope railings. After huge communal meals, we lay on the floor because there wasn’t enough furniture. I could barely hold on to the minutes, much less the hours; it was a swooping luge ride back to New York City and the years of sweet, exhausting babies, playgrounds, and mom friends, which passed even faster. There was always an endless accumulation: more books, more toys, bigger jobs with fancier clothes, and more salary — the earning of which somehow meant spending even more money to stay sane and keep the house clean.

There was always more of everything I ever wanted.

And then, when every closet and drawer was filled, and every child was graduated, I looked around, and it was too much. All that stuff, both physical and psychic, was clogging my arteries. It was hard to move fast, think, wander, breathe, and stumble on the shock of the new.

So, as is the way of my people, I decided last year that this was the time to move 3,000 miles back to Paris. It’s a place of temporal joys — the mercurial sun that turns an alley gold for an hour and disappears for a week, the food consumed by and with love. Yes, sure, you can shop here, boy, can you shop, but it’s not the point of being here.

Without an employer to pay for transatlantic shipping, leaving America meant a grand purge. It meant choosing a few things to take instead of a few to leave, the most extreme Marie Kondo ever. Do I love that giant roasting pan enough to ship it? Will Paris me need a Butterball-turkey-sized roasting pan? The answer was almost always no.

When I got to my empty Paris apartment furnished with a camping table and an inflatable bed, I felt the same terror and hope I have when facing a blank page. Nearly a year later, I have filled a narrow hall closet, some drawers, and most of my under-bed storage. But I’ve vowed never to buy one of those e Ikea storage units because cabinets always fill up, which will slow me down. Most of my walls are still bare, other than pictures of my beloveds. Maybe I’m waiting to see who I become before I put art up.

I didn’t even buy plants for months because I feared I’d be tempting fate by bringing living things home when this life didn't feel real, and my visa renewal hadn’t been approved. Now, they are everywhere: on all the window terraces, flanking the sofa, and in the kitchen. They are both my roots and my oxygen. And there is so much bare, writeable sky outside those French windows. I can breathe again.

RELATED: On the French visa medical exam and the wonderland of universal healthcare

Postscript:

A confession: I didn’t purge everything In the frenzied sale of my apartment last January. Stuff decisions got more panicked and drastic, but in the end, there were still leftovers, things in the undecided or unmanageable pile. And that is how my kids and I ended up standing in a storage unit utterly infested with moths two days after Christmas. A small cheap wool rug was tossed into the unit at the last minute, and when we picked it up, hundreds of tiny white larvae tumbled everywhere, all over the floor by our feet, on all over the bins and boxes. We screamed, pulled the storage door shut, locked it, and ran away.

We didn’t even get to take stock of what’s in there. We know there’s china, mirrors, and all those pretty things we loved too much to give up but not enough to carry. We saw the kind of mysterious duffel bags that haunt storage units. Everyone denies putting them there, and we’re all afraid to look inside them.

Storage units begin as saviors but quickly become the obscenely expensive albatrosses of modern life. They exist to make you revile everything you put in them. We intended to eliminate the whole unit to free ourselves. But when faced with the scale of our excess baggage and the horror moths, we decided we could only manage a move to a smaller, cheaper storage unit. So today, we go back to face the moths and do what we can to untether ourselves from the old stuff. My kids are making room for lives that are still getting bigger and more complicated. And me, I’m looking for focus, for more of fewer things.

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Well hello! I hope you enjoy this series about leaving Brooklyn for Paris You can subscribe here for free.

When I arrived in Paris at the start of the year, I was wearing brand-new punky boots with comically oversized soles. They make me look like an anime version of the Brooklyn mom I used to be and I didn’t take them off for three months. They were fashion armor, too over-the-top for a tourist. And though the weather’s nice at last, I won’t retire them because I still don’t know what kind of shoes Paris me wears.

Maybe to answer that question, I’ve been taking photos by the gigabyte. Most feature strangers—people I meet in cafes, on the Metro, and in flea markets. There are lots of selfies, too. It’s as if I’m mapping his new solar system to see where I belong and what I am. Am I Pluto? Am I more American here than I was in New York? Is it safer to remain an observer, the outsider in big boots? 

My dad had similar dilemmas. He grew up in Germany and even after decades in the U.S., he was still so German with his accent and conspicuously elegant wool coat.  He’d call the vacuum cleaner the “dustsucker” in front of our friends, and if we kids protested, he’d pronounce every syllable of vacuum so that it was more hilarious than dustsucker. 

When people asked, “Where’s that accent from?” Dad would raise his eyebrows and say: “Vaht accent?” Then he’d laugh. On the flip side, he didn’t think it was funny at all when he’d go back to Berlin, and they’d tell him he sounded American. He was neither and both, the beautiful fate of all expats.

RELATED: Come write with me in Paris this Spring as part of The Blue Hour.

However, there is an outsider privilege. To start, you’re often forgiven for blunt curiosity.  I’ll ask with my American accent if I can take someone’s picture, and they will almost always say yes and even pose.  I’ll go home and review the images and wonder how I fit into that scene, standing there with my dog. Then, I get off track with thoughts like: Can I make jumpsuits my whole personality here too? I inexplicably packed four of them, like I needed a uniform for Act III of my life.   

I don’t even know if I’m perceived here as an old lady with adult kids or middle-aged, never mind what’s appropriate clothing for whatever I am. This is the place that coined the expression: “une femme d'un certain âge.” But no one will tell you the exact age at which women become a woman of a “certain age,” much less when they transition from that to “old lady.” It is a matter of interpretation, like everything here.

There’s also an expression for women who are both attractive and ugly: jolie laide, or pretty ugly. Daphne Merkin described it thusly:  “Leave it to [the French]  to introduce a concept of feminine beauty so pure in its abstraction as to defy all logic. I am referring to the term "jolie laide," which translates literally into the clunking phrase "pretty-ugly," but which connotes something more lyrical, even. Transcendent.” 

No one comes to Paris for logic. So hello ambiguity, my new friend. I will learn to love the blurry bits, to be not young but not old, pretty ugly beautiful, utterly at home in Paris, but also still a stranger. And I’ll keep taking photos of people who seem definitively themselves, which might be the definition of chic. Here are a few:

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 I’m writing to you from Canal St. Martin, a village-like neighborhood in the north of Paris. I showed up here in January with two suitcases and a small dog. I sold or gave away my furniture in Brooklyn, so I only took what I could carry off the plane.

On my first day here, sweet friends greeted me before dawn with bread, coffee, and what a cheese vendor called the perfect “welcome camembert.” And just like that, I was home. Of course, some part of me has been plotting a return to this city since I left decades ago at the tender age of 30.

But don’t mistake this for a bid to recapture lost youth. I don’t want to be young again, I want to be new again.  And by new, I mean I want to be a beginner again. I want to be out of my element.

I want to be humbled by waiters and two-letter words, cheese decisions, and the manuals for tiny French washing machines.

I want to be told by a stranger that I must not “murder” a bottle of champagne with the wrong stopper and laugh out loud. I want to assume everything here is about one kind of seduction or another and to be right half the time.

I want to try and be an adult with the vocabulary of a 4th grader and to see something perplexing or lovely every time I leave the house.

I want to be afraid that I leaped so far that the net won’t be able to catch me and I’ll fall in front of everyone. And I want to wrap that fear in the reciprocal hope that it’ll keep me grateful.

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Sunrise on the Canal St. Martin

Of course, these dispatches will also be about Paris — the food, the flea markets, the light.  But I won’t be making lists of places to shop or hotels.  I want to share the delights and contradictions of being here and how discovering them can shake up an American soul. 

I’ll also tell you what happens when you run around town with a 21-pound spaniel in a country where dogs get served water in restaurants before I do. Tough guys stop in the streets and coo: “Il est trop!” (He’s too much!).  Department store clerks will cross a field of mattresses to whisper sweet nothings in his ear. It’s dog-calling instead of cat-calling.  And It’s magic, like having a personal ambassador.

I know this will all seem ordinary soon, so I’m holding onto the delicious oddness of seeing the world through a wacky cultural filter that tilts your perspective by about 60 degrees. Familiar elements are transformed by unfamiliar contexts. Everything seems right, and simultaneously, everything seems strange.

The great irony is that the brutally exhausting year of extricating myself from New York also forced me to see that city afresh. I had the same kind of beginner’s awe I now seek in Paris. I paid attention to Brooklyn’s charms in a way I hadn’t for years. I think it’s a kind of preemptive nostalgia. Like how you can love someone more acutely just after you break up. There’s a Portuguese concept that gets at this longing, this tender ache. They call it saudade. Sometimes I suspect that missing something can be sweeter than loving it.

The ride to JFK airport in January felt like peak saudade. My kids, Lars and Annika, drove me in Lars’ 1997 Volvo station wagon. Me in back, them in front. A new world order. My apartment sale was finalized that day, and I thought I’d be so relieved to get on the plane to Paris finally. No one was crying yet, but I wasn’t sure how long I’d last. Too late to turn back now, I gave away the sofa and the Instapot!

We hurtled along the Mad Max hellscape that is the Brooklyn Queens Expressway, a stretch of road that most truckers rate as the worst in the nation. There aren’t even painted lines to divide lanes, probably because no one pays attention to them anyway. From there, you emerge into the shocking serenity of the Belt Parkway, which swoops along New York Harbor. My mother’s people came into the country along that waterway, along with 12 million other immigrants.

The sun ricocheted off the water as we passed the Verrazano-Narrows bridge with its big gray shoulders. Janis Joplin was singing about freedom on a playlist made by my sublime Brooklyn-raised children. It made my chest ache—the scale of change, the history—ours and everyone’s, the unexpected loveliness, and the leaving.  

That’s the thing about New York: It is a symphony of bone-rattling contrasts. It slaps you with some aesthetic horror, then delivers magnificence to ensure you don’t forget it.

Suddenly, there we were, a little triad of a family in the vast fluorescent cavern of JFK, weepy and exhausted from months of hauling our lives out of the old apartment into the street, into storage, into other homes. All of us at the intersection of our own before and after. Act 3 for me, Act 2 for them. 

We got to the security line, and Annika said: “Mom, it’s like you’re going to study abroad!” We laughed. And then I walked away, wearing a long, orange wool coat like a neon caution sign, plus a backpack containing something even more clichéd than an American who loves Paris, an American who loves Paris with a cosseted little dog. 

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I was that most desperate of creatures: a rural teenager without a car. So I’d often have to bike six miles to work in my McDonald’s uniform. It was a full-body ensemble in the most disturbing shade of rust I’ve ever seen. I called it crime-scene brown. Worse yet, that polyester clung ferociously to odors, especially french fry grease. No amount of washing helped. So I’d pedal as fast as I could, pants legs flapping, to avoid being seen. Or smelled.  

This week I heard that a robot named Flippy is being trained to make burgers and fries. I thought, wow, I am one of his ancestors, an early human Flippy.

Robot Flippy is basically a very expensive mechanical arm in a black plastic sleeve attached to a computer. Turns out it takes a ton of processing power to do even simple, repetitive tasks as well as we squishy old humans do.  And even with all his artificial intelligence, Flippy sometimes flips out and loses track of what he's doing, just like us. And then his robot manager has to be called to get him moving again. 

My McDonald's manager would get us moving by standing behind us with a stopwatch to see if we could fill in order in under 60 seconds. It was both ridiculous and incredibly stressful.  That manager dude (and they were always dudes), was in his 30s. Or maybe 22. Anyway, to me, he was a grown-up.  And he’d make mysterious marks on his clipboard as the rest of us pinballed from stainless steel counter to stainless steel counter, scooping fries, pouring sodas, bumping into each other trying to beat the clock. 

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It was a lesson in leadership. And that lesson was that no matter how tiny or grubby the kingdom, someone is always desperate to be its ruler. Though, in hindsight, manager dude was probably only making 10 cents more than we were, an unlivable wage for an adult. And nothing has changed on that front. On the other hand, he didn’t have to wear the paper hat. 

The best part of a McDonald’s gig was that they'd discard burgers and Filet-O-Fish sandwiches in special bins after ten minutes under the heat lamps. So we’d all grab a few sandwiches when we went on break.  I ate and ate and ate, unable to muster any restraint. There was not a lot of food at my house back then, so this unlimited supply of hot sandwiches was irresistible. I was the same way about money.  You’d think that having learned to do without much, I’d have learned temperance. But it was the opposite.  If I had cash, I spent it; if I saw food, I consumed it.  Scarcity is sometimes the mother of excess. 

We weren’t supposed to have our lunch in front of customers, so I’d sit on a crate behind the restaurant, unwrapping my Quarter Pounders (yes, plural) and my custom-made mostly-fudge sundae. Looking out at the parking lot, with its little thatch of Dr. Seuss trees, I’d think: “Oh, if only I had a car. Then I could eat in that car instead of here, next to the dumpster.”  Such a dreamer. 

There were so many little cashier mandates, like folding the top of the bags so the M logo was facing forward. And remembering to smile, always smile, smile, smile. And you know how much women like being told to smile… 

Lucky for me, this was before fast-food joints and chain stores made their employees greet customers as “guests.” There’s something dystopian about standing in a line and hearing someone shout “next guest, please!” as you shuffle a few steps forward with the herd. That phrase ruins a beautiful word. Guest means to be offered a place at the table, it’s a bit of grace. And, if this escalation of commercial intimacy continues, I fear cashiers and/or robots will end up saying, “Next lover, please step up to register two!” 

I was always so worried about not doing a good enough job at McDonald’s. Though I did manage to fill orders in under 60 seconds eventually. Of course there was that time I tried to iron the pants of my uniform forgetting that polyester is a petroleum product. For the rest of my tenure, I had a huge triangle burn on my right pant leg. It was evidence that I cared way too much than was normal for a teenager. Or that I was an idiot. Or both. The way I looked in those ridiculous pants would have zero effect on the rest of my life.  But I was too young to see beyond that year’s embarrassments, much less into the next decade. 

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Flippy the robot doesn’t have such existential concerns. He doesn’t even need pants! So I get why he’s appealing as an employee. Theoretically, he’d be cheaper and easier to manage than a person. But for now, the McDonald’s CEO says he’s not installing robots everywhere. Probably because they cost thousands of dollars to buy and thousands more for software and servers. Flippy also needs “robot support specialists” who likely make as much in a few hours as most fast food employees make in a month.  

I wonder what it would be like to work with a Flippy. Sure, he doesn’t follow you around with a stopwatch. But can he take the register when you’re desperate for a break? Nope.

Nor can Flippy sit by the dumpsters with you, eating hash browns as you consider whether to get a job at the nursing home where your friend Pauline works. It’s physically and emotionally difficult to feed, lift and bathe the residents. But you get to know them, and that is something. Besides, Pauline is a generous soul who would go out of her way to give you a ride, even in a Massachusetts ice storm. True, the nursing home uniform is also polyester.  And you have to buy it yourself. But it is plain white, like a blank slate or an unwritten future. 

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THE GREAT REWILDING

In response to last week’s essay about that time my Dad turned our front yard into a meadow, several of you sent stories about rewilding your lawns with less thirsty plants. And here’s some photographic evidence:

At the top is Leon B.’s newly rewilded winter garden in Cape Town, South Africa which has attracted local birdlife, and, suspiciously, the family cat, Red. And below is Pete M.’s mostly xeriscaped yard in Wheat Ridge, Colorado, a riot of flowers including roses, asters, poppies, phlox, iris, crocus, tulips, peonies, plus a number of grasses and trees. Wild on, my friends. (How to rewild your garden in 10 easy steps.)

I learned to run in Paris. My friend T., a distance runner, convinced me to jog with her from where we worked in a chaotic part of the city to the Bois de Boulogne, a 2100-acre expanse of woods, lakes and restaurants on the edge of the city.

Our office wasn’t far from the Bois, on T.'s scale of "far" anyway, maybe a mile and a half. But the first time we did that run, I thought I'd throw up before we even got to the park. The route was uphill in stagnant urban heat, threading through clots of tourists and the merciless centrifuge of cars around the Arc de Triomphe. I was ready to collapse after 3 minutes. But T. wasn't having it. She showed me how to pull my shoulders back, opening my chest so I could get more oxygen.

I'd always run defensively with my head down as if I were darting across the street against traffic while being chased (a skill you can only perfect in New York). But with my chin up, I could breathe better, and I felt my legs take over as if I'd shifted the energy there. Just keep moving, said T. And somehow, I did. Granted, it was more like a slow motion trot than running. 

And then, the sky shifted and we were out of the concrete glare on a tree-lined path where it felt 15 degrees cooler. Everything went technicolor. You could smell all that greenery and hear the crunch of your feet hitting the ground. I forgot my petty aches, my embarrassments. I forgot myself.  And, for a little while, misery turned to wonder. 

Pull your shoulders back and press on. Keep going until you can see past the shadow of your own ego. This is not so complicated. Why do we have to keep relearning lessons we got at 16 or 26 or 46?

Months later, T. and I ran after dark through the section of the Bois de Boulogne where sex workers set up for the evening. They wait for clients near cars and vans they've turned into mobile hideaways with curtains, glowy lamps, and pillows. As we ran by, faces and bodies would appear on the edges of the trees, like flickering scenes in a film. Bright eyes with extravagant eyebrows, a long furry coat open with glittery nothings underneath, blue ankle boots, bare legs in the cold, a slim-hipped silhouette against the sober gray outline of the forest. They watched as we fluttered by them, benign interlopers that we were. We were extras from some other movie set. 

I can't recall precisely what insular troubles my young heart was battling in those days. Surely, there was lots of 20-something drama and angst. But that night is still vivid, those faces in the dark and the adrenaline of crossing unseen boundaries.

If only we could go back and tell our angsty past selves that what seemed to matter so much now won’t matter in a decade.  Just let go of the slights and busybody worries that block out the sun.  What will stay with you are the times you were shaken out of your myopic orbit. Sometimes it's when beauty scoops you up, or fear, or both. Like the feeling of moving fast through damp fall air in the woods, the unexpected flashes of color in the dark, the murmurs of people you can't see and will never meet. And mostly, it’s the electricity of being somewhere you never expected to be. 

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Last year, Australian journalist Julia Baird published a lovely book called "Phosphorescence" about rediscovering these truths after wrestling with a near-fatal illness. She learns to swim and dive in the ocean. Sounds simple, but that vast alternate universe with its wild and alien creatures rekindles her connection to the world, to wonder, and to life. The book is a call to at last shed the heaviness of self.  She writes: 

"We seem to have forgotten how comforting it can be to feel small and experience the awe that comes from being silenced by something greater than ourselves, something unfathomable, unconquerable, and mysterious."  

In the book and her TEDTalk, Baird draws on research that validates what we all intuitively know: Getting outside ourselves has mind and body benefits.  As she puts it, cultivating our sense of wonder can make us “more patient and less irritable, more humble, more curious, and creative.” All of this is balm for the selfie-era of internet-fueled rumination and therapy TikTok.  

In one study Baird mentions, adults were asked to take weekly 15-minute walks during which they'd seek moments of awe, in other words, intentionally look outward. Not surprisingly, this group reported more joy and pro-social connectedness than the control. The sentiment echos writer Cheryl Strayed’s favorite piece of advice: Put yourself in the way of beauty."  

We know all this though, don’t we? Yet, thanks to our chronic emotional amnesia, we forget what’s good for us. Or at least we have to keep relearning what's not good for us when it comes to food, love, jobs, friendships, and tequila. Or maybe we unconsciously choose to ignore our wiser selves.

 I don't have a fix for this, or I wouldn't have been up all last night like an over-caffeinated lemur staring at a detective drama about something called the Glasgow Marine Homicide Unit.  But maybe we could more charitably call this kind of madness “unintentional beginner's mind” In that case, we won’t count on a singular revelation or turning point, but rather constant resets, and a hope that we’ll recover these bits of wisdom a little more easily every year. 

When I was back in Paris a few weeks ago, I brought my running shoes despite the record-breaking heat wave (the "canicule," as the French call it). This time I did my little upright jog (shoulders back, eyes up) in the Jardin du Luxembourg, that grand old park on the Left Bank with its obsessively groomed trees and voluptuous flower beds.   

The Jardin has more statues of women than I've ever seen in any public space (and most of them even have clothes on). I always visit the twenty queens of France (and other illustrious women) who stand in a semi circle around the main garden. They watch benevolently as generations of us trundle past them, fretting about our 21st-century troubles. 

First, there's Saint Genevieve, patron saint of Paris, with her elfin face and braids that fall below her knees. She was born in 423, an unimaginable date. From Genevieve, I trot through the centuries woman by woman, each presiding over some dramatic moment in the eternal cycles of human chaos or creation, reminding us that none of what we're angsting about is that novel. 

My favorite queen is the spectacular Marguerite d'Angoulême, Queen of Navarre, a prolific 16th-century writer, intellectual and mother of the French Renaissance. Of her, historian Will Durant  wrote, "every free spirit looked upon her as protectoress and ideal." Appropriately, she stands as if in contemplation with her right arm across her waist, and her left index finger posed delicately under her chin.

The day that a trot through the Jardin doesn't revive my weary little soul with an infusion of awe, there will be no hope for me. And lately, I’ve been thinking about how the queens don't change even as my face softens and my gait slows. When you are young, Paris seems ancient, and then when you are not as young, you marvel at how it doesn't seem to age.

Sure, the French state spends a lot on keeping the capital pretty, but the place is also vivified by fresh waves of people in search of some spark, some evolved version of themselves. Most will find the insight they’re looking for, then lose it, as we all do. But the lesson is, you can always loop back. The old trees and the young queens will still be there.

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RELATED 

Phosphorescence: On Awe, Wonder And Things That Sustain You When The World Goes Dark, and The Power of Feeling Small, by Julia Baird,TEDx Sydney. 

A Guide to taking  ‘Awe Walks” from UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center which collects the best research-based methods for a happier, more meaningful life. 

The Hidden Brain podcast: Reframing Our Reality  Stanford psychologist Alia Crum says that our perceptions are always filtered through our mindsets which shape our reactions to physical and psychological stressors in profound ways.

London Delights: Wisdom from an overheated island where the cathedrals are blessedly cool, the art is hot, and musical irony abounds.

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PARIS DELIGHTS

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