I haven’t blogged for a while, both because I’ve started a new job that involves writing all day (I love it!) and because I keep starting and stopping blogs trying to write something perfect.
Having given up on public-facing perfection, here’s what I’ve been up to in San Francisco. First, it’s one of the happiest times of my life – like Delhi, or college, or Scotland. Mostly I spend time with people, and when I am alone, I walk. It’s a meditative process, and the area in which I live is ripe for it, filled with hills and gardens and colourful houses; and anytime you walk up a different hill – even a street over from one you’ve been up before – there’ll be a breathtaking new view.
Most of all, on my walks, I’ve been finding and documenting staircases. There are hundreds of public staircases in San Francisco, from run-of-the-mill concrete ones, to multi-storey wooden ones with platform doorways and flowers, to ones made of mosaics. Sometimes I walk miles to find specific ones: the dragon on the edge of a schoolyard playground near Mount Davidson; or the dozens that line Buena Vista Park. But mostly I just stumble onto them.
Once, I was on a street that ended and turned into a maze of curving staircases, and I wandered up them in a haze, and half an hour later I thought I almost died, and I wondered for the next weeks whether I’d merely hallucinated it all, until I went back and there they were, with overhanging vines and sunset views of the whole city and East Bay. So beautiful and strange are the staircases of San Francisco.
Then I hike, which is walking, too; there’s no real line between walking and hiking except probably that hiking is more social. And biking: yesterday, I biked for the first time through the fog and wondered why I’d only until now biked in the sun. The brush on the cliffs looks like Scotland or South Africa; you’d think, if you looked long enough, you’d see some whales or seals; the bridge and the headlands were covered in fog.
And I ask myself sometimes as I walk and I am happy: what am I doing and why am I here and was it (any of it) about something else? Or was it actually about finding the best ways to do good (our vertical’s tagline) or aspiring to be Socrates? Was it about moral philosophy, or the most beautiful city in America – in heaven, I wrote, I am always there, and it is always 75 degrees – or the fact that again, there is a church across the street from my house? My friend called it making things be about things. I get off at the Downtown Berkeley BART and it’s like it’s autumn again, except then I walk upstairs and drink ginger tea and ask questions like I’m the most annoying person in ancient Athens.
I’ve been reading the Hebrew Bible and the Gita and the utilitarians. My mind hasn’t stopped for over a month. I’m constantly spewing unformed thoughts into group chats. I wonder if I can reconcile what I do on a personal level with what I do for my job. It’s about life being a gift, I told my friend. How could I reject that gift? How could I not want to do everything I can to ensure everyone can enjoy this gift? I wonder if the desire for a coherent moral philosophy is silly; and yet, I can do no other.
But even if it was about something else, say the people who know me best, it wasn’t a bad thing. Any of it – when I took the train to New York years ago wearing shoes that gave me blisters, and when, from there, I went back to Zambia. So many trains, and walks on university campuses at night. Love is intimate and grand; frightening and devastatingly human, uncomfortably free from the abstractions of philosophy.