Surprises In NYC

We arrived at our hotel on Central Park South at 3pm. Early enough to wander around and find a good place for dinner as we had no plans for our first night. We both adored this city and weren’t tourists any more as we had both lived in Manhattan at different times in our lives and both continued to visit often.  We have come together every April since we met that 1st January in 2024, because Danielle and Jacob spend a rare week with R for their spring break. I had decided that this time our trip needed a theme: “Best Burgers at Bars”. In general, Michael and I prefer eating at the bar of a restaurant – better vantage point for people watching, good service but most of all it’s cozier and more romantic to be able to snuggle together while we sip our cocktails and share our food. Sharing food happens to be one of our love languages. 

Traveling is always an easy infusion of novelty, new experiences and dopamine. Yet, because Manhattan feels a bit like a second home to me, I realize now that, in the days leading up to this trip, I didn’t have the excitement of the unknown delight and surprise that I would  normally have if we were traveling somewhere that I had never been before. I knew where we were staying, I knew we would visit some favorite restaurants and museums and take our usual bike ride through Central Park. In general I “knew” what to expect… I thought. How ridiculous to think that I have even a basic understanding of life, something so full of mystery and surprise that it cannot possibly be understood or explained in most circumstances … and yet I think we all do that to some extent. We wake up each day and think that somehow, because we know our schedule of appointments and activities for the day, that the day will be devoid of surprise and, thus, we forget to look.  One of the many goals of this journal is to grow my own daily practice of seeing, and stopping to appreciate, the delights and surprises that life offers us every single day, but which we carelessly gloss right over in our rush to “the next thing”.  

I didn’t know we would end up at the iconic wooden bar at Cipriani, an iconic bar I had been wanting to go to for years but forgotten about.  I didn’t know we would eat dinner at the Daniel Bouloud (a favorite nyc chef) Tiffany Cafe on the 6th floor of the gorgeous Tiffany building. I didn’t know the cherry blossoms would be blooming and falling on our Central Park bike ride and that seeing them would give us such a moment of joy that Michael and I would spontaneously begin to write a haiku together as we made our way north. Each a Magical Moment that left behind a single pearl on the string of memories that make up my unique life and even though I had ridden a bike through Central Park dozens of times, I didn’t know EXACTLY what THIS time would be like and what different turn it could take. 

The surprise and delight is there for the taking.  All we have to do is stop for an instant and take in the micro moments of joy that life gives us each and every day.