Thinking Time: On Carrying

Bags, Dolphin Snacks, the Search for Balance

The following was transcribed from my notebook several mornings ago. One of my favorite activities is thinking time, where I wander around my neighborhood in Brooklyn with a notebook and follow a thread in my mind. I always love the ideas that thinking time leads me to. I sometimes feel the temptation to polish these writings and give them a clearer structure, more examples and some more grounded ways of communicating what I’m talking about. But that process is so disinteresting to me that I will end up not sharing anything if I give in to the need to translate myself. And I want to share because I want to discuss, and put a piece of my internal conversation into the big one. So, here’s what I’m thinking about right now.

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Today, August 10th 2025, I am sitting on a stoop, drinking an iced coffee from a paper cup, regaining my strength.

The corner I am sitting on has some kind of magic, or else good shade, for people keep stopping right in front of me to look around or have a little chat. Kid on roller blades with backpack, attractive man with grocery bags – everyone is carrying things, I notice now, and that is the rhythm of the city I can no longer stand! Small bags to big bags to tote bags to purses to pockets. I lost my ID recently by refusing to bring a bag out with me, so I now know this is not a battle I have much ground to conquer.

The bags have won.

The bags have fully and completely come to dominate New York City. And if you do not like hauling around multiple activities worth of items, you will either be much too ill prepared to enjoy yourself (see: remove shirt at park to use as tiny blanket) OR be home, alone, surrounded by all the things you might need but estranged from the inconvenient beauty that makes this place wonderful.

On the other side of every Carry is almost certainly something very special, and this is what makes New York a place that is very real, in a time when many places are increasingly operating as computer labs of sorts.

In New York, every day at every minute, physical things are being moved and exchanged and created and stolen and left behind. You cannot live in New York without operating as part of this tapestry. And it is crazy to think that there could be any other way to live except that we have invented a way and it is called suburbia (likely to avoid the awful discomfort of the constant Carry).

In the span of this writing so far I have come to understand that the thing I thought I hated about New York is the reason I love it. As long as people are carrying things, people will leave things behind and as long as people are losing things people are finding things and to find a thing, especially that right thing at just that right time is all the proof we need to understand that we’re part of something enormous.

It is easy to see this vastness in digital space. In an afternoon, I can send a piece of work around the world. Within minutes, we can know of an earthquake in Russia, a hit single released in the UK, what Trump just said. It is obvious the way we are at once instantaneously connected.

The same vast connectedness happens in the non digital world, but it is harder to see because the pace at which information travels happens much slower than we are accustomed to understanding with our rational brains. I believe that intuition lies in this place – not in a magical and otherworldly reality – just in a very very slow one. The reason we do not let ourselves think slowly is because that would require admitting how remarkably little is accomplished in a lifetime.

To live is to exist in energetic exchange and watching the trees and the flowers and the birds for an afternoon is so wonderful because it helps us see the way that we are working in remarkably similar ways. And for the squirrels it seems so easy because they do not have a story (as far as we know), but us humans have a story and therefore there is somewhere to go.

Our lives take place always in a unique chapter of this story and the struggle for power is the clawing for the chance to write a line. It is why death is devastating (too soon!) and misfortune debilitating. To watch the story with little opportunity to participate forces one to reckon with the way we are operating no differently than all the less sentient creatures – just with more paperwork and types of snacks.

Side question: How many types of snacks to dolphins have?

To relinquish the story would lead inevitably to more peace and more meaning. We have been tricked into believing the meaning is in the story but it is not – the story exists to remind us where the meaning lives: in the tiny and never ending exchange of our days.

What did you carry with you? What did you gain? What did you leave behind?

These are the questions that I am asking myself these days. Where are my resources coming from and where are they going? What is the culmination of my Carries?

We are trying to address our large scale energetic inefficiencies with large scale solutions but that’s exactly the problem. We must stop forsaking any ounce of the present for the future. There is no way to “get ahead” in a system dependent on balance. We are panickedly searching for equilibrium – spending our days trying to fight an inevitable advancement of worse days. And herein lies the cause of our collective suffering. We’ve forgotten the part of this that’s anything at all: the things we touch, the air we breathe, the way we spend our time and the people we spend it with. Our lives are not the things we make, the people we influence, the milestones we accomplish. These are inevitable byproducts of the journey, but they are not the journey. Our lives are our days and our days are our hours and our hours are the way we enjoy them.

Creation is the Great human pleasure and we’ve turned it into our work.

Our Work, it turns out, is very simple:

Pass it on.

Yours,

Tala

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