When you don’t commit, you get to live on the outside and feel like it’s ‘only temporary’, and therefor less terrifying, less real, of less consequence… You can trick yourself into feeling like you’re ‘just a visitor’ and therefor everything you do is less permanent and significant in terms of impact and influence (and damage..!)

We spent one of those rare weekends where community and kid commitments dictated our activities, instead of a list of sites and activities and explorations that I’d curated during my Friday and Saturday morning coffee routine…exceptionally important for the kids who got to have real play dates with friends, in our neighbourhood, doing purely kid-driven stuff.

Not that my itineraries dismiss this criteria, but they’re certainly crafted with my selfish desire to see new stuff, take cool photos, and fuel my creativity with new experiences…

While I’d felt so lonely last weekend, a weird set of circumstances had us going out on our first ‘couples date’ with real live friends, actually talking as people who ‘live’ here, moaning with legitimacy about rental costs, sharing fears about middle-school competitiveness, talking about which storage locker place is best… Uniquely New York, but ‘normal’ ish stuff to talk about when you’ve shifted from visiting to living here….

Which really, I don’t think I have.

I sometimes think I’m more comfortable than I really am. Which is a pretty normal feeling for a lot of us, especially with Monday morning blues rolling in…

Maybe, for a period in your life, you don’t ever really need to make that shift, fully. Not sure how practical that is, or if there are ways of always feeling like a visitor that help to keep the spirit of curiosity and exploration alive… While also embracing enough of a committed, settled approach to still feel like you belong, that you have meaningful connections to people and community…

I want my kids to feel safe and embraced and a part of something, both so that they have the support and comfort that a ‘home’ and community offer, and also so that they feel responsible to contribute to, and show respect to something bigger than themselves.

And if I’m acting like this is all temporary and fleeting and not really something to invest in, then how can I expect that they’ll know what that means.

So instead of showing up at the community event yesterday to make a little appearance, fleet around offering pleasantries, friendly yet removed enough to not really require more than an hour of commitment, and then ushering us off to some other corner of the city with one of 14 fall festivals tempting us, me, I begrudgingly ( at first, I’ll admit) resigned to staying in a 2 mile radius for an entire day.

And the kids had a great time.

No Lower East Side Pickle Day this year. But the kids played and ran and danced and scooted and carousel-ed their little butts off, and we made a step to being a committed part of something. For now at least…;)