Living: Hotel Hotel Hostel, Freemont, Seattle
Working: Wework South Lake Union
Laundry: Fremont Clean Express Laundry
This week in laundry I enjoy the view and revel the new.
Out of all the places where I’ve done laundry, the view from where I’m sitting is perhaps the best by far. At least for a laundromat.
The view from the Fremont Clean Express Laundry
The view from Outsite in San Diego may best this one, depending upon your qualifications for best of view.
The view from my workspace at Outsite San Diego
One thing Outsite does not have, however, is this:
So that’s where they go!
Reducing myself to carry-on in many ways could make life more difficult. Or at least less convenient. But those inconveniences, once accepted, open the gateway to convenience through simplicity – there are advantages to be had, and I make a point to try and have them.
It offers the opportunity to shift your focus on what’s important, away from your possessions, and more so on your experiences. Which is a very millennial thing to do – and a core ethos behind the minimalist movement.
One of the most profound improvements I’ve encountered in my simplified life comes from my socks. I no longer have a problem with mismatched pairs. Wherever it is that lost socks go, it seems they no longer feel the need to leave me for that place.
But beyond the pleasure I find in perpetually paired foot-underwear, life on the road affords me the opportunity to focus on the experience of the new.
And as someone who is admittedly a person of habit, making a routine of the unhabitual – the new, the adventure – strongly disagrees with my modus operadi. But by adopting it into my identity, and finding habit, ritual, and routine not despite it, but through it, I find ways to make what would be unsettling and stressful new situations no different from any habit I might adopt as a rooted homebody. (Such as and obviously: doing laundry).
I’ve never been to Seattle before. Out of my five months on the road so far, this is only the second time I’ve been to a new city (Tucson was the first) – and the first time I’ve been somewhere new by choice (I had business meetings all week in Tucson).
Seattle Skyline – a new view
Coming in to a new city offers many an opportunity for trepidation. How about transportation? How about safety in the areas of the city I travel in or through? My expectations are peppered by my past experiences, both good and bad. But you really don’t know until you’re there.
Link Light Rail from Seattle/Tacoma Airport into Downtown Seattle
I can say, without a doubt, any trepidation I may have had has washed away. Here in the laundromat, I could not be more at home. And here in this laundromat, with Union Lake outside the window, wrapped in the comfort of the Land of Lost Left socks, I feel grounded and safe. I feel as though, in this very moment, I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be. I’m where I belong.
With the worst of the unknown lost somewhere in the rinse cycle, I’m left only with the excitement, wonder, and pleasure that accompanies the exploration of new places and spaces.
Undoubtedly, there’s something remarkably enjoyable about entering a new physical space – be it a city, a building, a theater, a national park, a treehouse, or a themed land.
Certainly there’s the enjoyment of the novel. The new and unique always engages our attention in a way that the routine and the mundane does not. That’s what makes special things special.
But it seems to me that this effect is compounded when that thing is a new space or place.
Are these sensations of novelty and new locations the same? Or are they different? Does the pleasure of an unexplored location share a common root with the pleasure of the unique, only heightened and amplified? Or are these in fact separate pleasures that occur simultaneously – a pleasure of the novel, and a pleasure of unfamiliar spaces?
I’m no neuroscientist or psychologist, so I’m unlikely to tease out the correct answer – even if I were to spend some time digging for supporting research (which would betray the spirit of blogging while washing).
But I do think some insight to an answer comes through a slightly correlated question: what makes romantic cities romantic?
By city I mean New York. I mean Paris. I mean Rome (Rome-antic – get it?).
By romantic I don’t mean romantic-as-in-love. I mean romantic in the daydream, fantasy sense. I mean that these cities occupy in our minds, through media and popular culture, a certain idea. Not just an idea, a certain ideal.
If I say New York, that conjures specific images, thoughts, and feelings in your head. And maybe if you’ve lived there those are very complicated, but for the rest of us, we tend to get a very different sense – a sense of possibility, a sense of hope, a sense of the dream.
It’s not the real New York. It’s an idealized New York. A hope of New York. An idea of what New York could be, what you want it to be. It’s a dream New York. It’s a romanticized New York.
And those ideas, those concepts, came from somewhere. From books, movies, TV, parents, friends, school, and elsewhere.
But the fact that these cities – these locations – take on this pleasant and enjoyable property of fantasy – a story if you will – imbues them with something that novelty alone cannot hold.
And maybe story holds the key to understanding that oh-so-something special in the adventure of a new location.
Gasworks Park – Lake Union – Seattle
Think about it, when you’re on vacation, in an unfamiliar space, are you telling yourself a story? It may be subtle, but it’s likely there. Maybe you’re telling yourself a story of an adventurer, traveling to a new location for a new discovery. Maybe your telling yourself a story of being a local, taking on a unique and different culture, ritual, habit, cuisine, or even language from your usual homely habits. Maybe you’re telling yourself a story about a better life you could have. Or maybe you are preparing a story to tell your friends – a story you’ll tell through the pictures and video you took, the social media you shared, or the food you ate and the people you met.
And maybe you’re telling yourself a story of how you’ll tell your friends a story of your great adventure. For it’s the things that are new that are worth telling – the old and the routine have already been told, known, and understood. But new things have value – they prepare us for the world. We help each other understand the world and anticipate it through the information we share about it – and in this sense, it’s the new things we share that have this heightened value.
The next time you find yourself in a new location, and suddenly catch yourself in the pleasure that comes from being in that new location, take a moment to search yourself – is there a story there? Are you telling that story to yourself? Are you preparing to tell that story to others? Or is the place itself, telling you a story? Are the people in it, telling you a story? Most certainly so – and because it is new, it is a new story. Like reading a good book for the first time – this is always a great pleasure.
Most likely, it’s a little of all of the above.
I’ve found that some people, when they travel, like to wear clothes that represent their home culture, like home team tee-shirts. While others prefer to dress in a similar fare to the locals.
Both are valid approaches to dressing oneself abroad. I’m certainly not one to judge; I wear my fair share of identity based comfort clothes. But I think that which approach we choose to take when we dress on our adventures very much reflects the root of our preferred story when we’re abroad – the cultural ambassador on the one hand, and the story of the local on the other.
What’s common in both cases is that, without a doubt, there’s a story underlying the root of the experience.
I think this feeling is also why I’d catch myself from time to time in the Chicago spring, and suddenly feel that I was in Europe – in Paris, or Amsterdam – due to a combination of feelings, smells, and architecture, all of which somehow come together and transport me to another location. They come together, and without my permission, place me in a story of somewhere new.
Whatever the origin, the purpose, or the mechanism, the fact is that the feeling exists, and I’m all the happier for it. And between the serenity of Puget Sound on a sunny afternoon, the novelty of a yacht soaked Lake Union, and the comfort of the Land of Lost Left Socks, I am most definitely feeling it. Like a rich new story, and without any knowledge yet of where the plot will take me. In this moment, all the world is filled with hope and wonder, and I am a child at the playground of life.
Seattle offers me some advice