I Love the World
There are days when living in the city is almost too much for me to deal with. The sheer number of people you interact with every time you leave the house makes it exquisitely painful to be a person of heightened empathy and compassion; but the very same condition makes it unconscionable to be anything less.

It is impossible not to believe in the essential goodness of the human spirit here; a city like this is ideal for people-watching, and you can't watch them for long without seeing surprising acts of openness, moving moments of honesty and heroism, glimpses of the incredible strength we all carry within our fragile shells. People living in extraordinary conditions become extraordinary themselves; they glitter like diamonds, even in the dullness of everyday routine. All of the selfishness and weakness only makes that goodness, that internal strength somehow more apparent. You see it in war, you see it in famine, you see it in hospitals. And you see it in cities, when we all have somehow to cope with sharing our backyard with eight million other humans. Just to live your day-to-day life here, you must learn a special wisdom, a sort of extraordinary kindness wrapped around an uncompromising instinct for self-preservation.

It is humbling and difficult to be confronted, every day, with so many connections you will never pursue: laughter you will never share, tears you will never console, stories you will never know the end of. Just as life itself will someday go on without you, the city is forever expanding beyond your reach, leaving you with fragments of understanding, glimpses of other lives. But, at the same time, you understand yourself to be a part of it; whatever we are making, here, whatever we are building with our passions and our quarrels and our grace, you know that your presence is changing it, that you are helping to make it what it is. And that is a beautiful thing to know.

Sometimes I become so overwhelmed by the beauty and frailty of the human condition that I fall a little bit in love with everyone I meet.