Whiplash... being flung from the city to the woods and back again, every few minutes

So every time I try to make real estate or design the pure focus of this page, I find I end up talking myself out of writing so many things, and weeks go by without saying anything. It’s getting to be too frustrating to be worth the restriction, so it’s time to just write what I want to write. Maybe soon I’ll even get to do art and wood stuff again! Anyway, there will still be useful things on here, like what’s new and improved in real estate in 2023 and that sort of rot, but for now, I wanted to share what hit me the other night, while watching the crowd at a concert in Chicago.

My days involve a lot of driving. A LOT OF DRIVING. Last year, especially once our move was finished and the second half of the year had almost no real estate work and never-ending projects in our yet-unfinished house, it seemed like I drove very little. The odometer does not lie, however. I’ve had my car since Friday, March 13, 2021, and it was handed over to me with 2521 miles on it. Today it crossed 42,000. Lately, I’ve had a lot of real estate work - THANK HEAVENS - and almost all of it is in the downtown neighborhoods of Chicago. My house is about 40 miles from where I end up most days, and back in the days before everyone started working from home, that could easily be 2+ hours at the wrong time of day. EACH WAY. But now, because of less traffic and my lack of needing to be out in rush hour, sometimes it takes only 50 minutes of basically flying on the highway, with podcasts and playlists and audiobooks galore. There have been times I have gotten there and my episode of Tig and Cheryl True Story isn't over yet and I’m sorta bummed it was so fast. I finished Colin Jost’s A Very Punchable Face in less than 4 days while driving, and I highly recommend it if you have a commute that allows you to entertain others who might see you laughing like an idiot in your car. Once I get downtown, I bounce quickly from a showing, to an open house, or a class, or a meeting for one of my 3 different careers, or seeing a friend, all of which are usually over in a blur and then I’m on to the next before hurrying back home again. There’s a million choices of where to eat, where I wish I was eating, where I could eat next time, where I have eaten before and want to eat again, stores I might someday shop at, stores to recommend to my kids, and so many other CHOICES. It’s a constant parade of colors and options and thoughts and stimulus and people. So many people - talking, interacting, arguing, laughing, helping, shoving, smiling, struggling, and the rest of them have AirPods in.

There is an undercurrent, though, flowing along beneath that makes me always want to hurry home within seconds of finishing the last item on the list. Maybe it’s the giant list of projects still to do (though most days I won’t have time to work on any of them anyway), or the fact that there is still one kid at home, or the cats, or maybe it’s my tendency to always need to do the opposite of what I’m doing unless I’m doing something physically active - like running/hiking/biking/shoveling/mowing/sanding/painting/walking. It really doesn’t matter, it’s just reality. So, more often than not, instead of taking my time and visiting with clients or ‘relaxing’ as I’m told some people do, I fly back home while my car entertains me with tales of the current state of our planet’s biodiversity or medieval history or Lizzo or Bob Dylan or a mix of all of it. As soon as I get close to home, though, there are no lights, no sounds, (almost)no people. Maybe the local gang of teenage deer are in the driveway, and the TV might be on when I come in, but that’s it. If I walk to the curb to get the garbage cans, it’s in complete silence for a 1/4 mile each way. When I drag them back, empty, the echoing sound they make is nearly deafening, like the inside of an MRI machine. If I was dragging garbage cans where I had been during the day, no one would even notice. Because this journey often takes less than an hour, and often i’m only downtown for 1-2 hours, lately I’m noticing a palpable tennis match going on inside my head between the chaos and the silence. I didn’t notice it as much when we lived in town, because that basically just felt like a far-flung neighborhood of the continuous cityscape. Now, however, it gets disorienting.

So back to that concert, the one that got me thinking about all this. I was in the balcony, looking over the crowd and noticed all the interaction and incongruous movement of so many people, going a million different little directions at once, and jostling around each other. At the same time, though, we were all there to enjoy the same show, the same music, generally the same experience. A city street often has that same energy, with a few hundred people all doing their own things, but sharing the space and the destination and the amenities of that particular spot. As much as I deeply feel how overrun and overpopulated the planet is when humans are concerned, I also feel that these moments are how it’s meant to be. The sharing and the jostling and mutual enjoyment of a thing are something that is sorely lacking when I’m at home and there is both silence and a lack of mutual enjoyment of a thing going on. I’m not proposing any sort of change to all of this, I’m just throwing this realization out there for discussion (see my reference above to the lack of interaction here at home for some reasons for blogging it in the first place). I have also noticed that while we often term nature as ‘silent’, it really shouldn’t be unless you’re talking about certain types of landscapes that are naturally devoid of critters. For a site that is heavily wooded and surrounded by more acres of woods, it’s always super quiet here, save for an occasional bird or the commuter train passing on the tracks about 1/2 mile away or an ambulance heading to the hospital that’s about 3 miles away. I’ve sat by streams in Britain to have a snack while walking and been struck by the sheer volume of bird chatter. I was in the ‘bush’ in New Zealand on a walk near Lake Tarawera, and noticed the same, but apparently when westerners first arrived there and before they cut down most of the forest, the birdsong was so loud it could be heard from boats moored off the coastline. To try and combat this, I’m going to attempt to add plants around the lot that attract pollinators and birds, maybe give them some sort of refuge in this locality that is widely referred to as ‘countryside’ when in reality it is a heavily manicured and professionally landscaped overlay on top of glacial till. If it works, outside the house I should be able to hear and see the chaos and interaction of hundreds of creatures, going about all their different pursuits while sharing the enjoyment of a place and what it has to offer. Maybe that will settle down the whiplash effect and give my brain a break, maybe not, but it will certainly give me another big pile of work to do that demands I hurry back home again the second I’m done in the heart of the city.