Urban Integration

The city has a way of absorbing people. It fascinates at first, drawing your eyes skyward. Luring you in with all the modern amenities, innovations, opportunities. For the two weeks you are overloaded with new new new everything. The lights, the noise, the cars, the people. All around is what you want. What you need.

The new new new gets old. Gets annoying. It starts to go right at your conscious. You run away to other places. Places that remind you of where you once were. Where you want to be, and how you want to go back. Nostalgia sets in, and your senses get blurred. You learn to hate the city. Its people, its bustle, its constant sense of go. The senses become a bad overload instead of a good one. Life sets in and you want to just escape and go back to normalcy.

Then you find your niche. Sitting by yourself, people watching, among a spot you claim as your own, you realize there is a whole. There is a self within a whole that you have been thrown in to, whether you like it or not. The feelings of ebb and flow come and go, and it all begins to make sense. Like the waves of the ocean, the urban area pulls you, but you pull it. The collective selves pull the entire whole. And you may not like it at times, but you learn to find your place, your eccentric spots, your corners in the gardens.

Walking among the people you realize all is well with the world, like you have felt so many times before. Calmness comes over you in a time and place when you thought calmness was unapproachable. You synchronize, become one, not with a god or the earth, but with the people. A mass of collected people all bunched into a unbelievable small area, one nature had not intended us to experience.

Yet it works.

Everyone exists, all together. The guy playing Beatles songs in the Metro makes your day a bit brighter, while the bakery lady always delivers the best cafe con leche you can ever order. Characters arise, people integrate, and you find a sense and purpose among all.

This really must be the strangest, yet most beautiful feeling I've felt in a while. What an experience.