In Nairobi, I'd walk up our dead-end street to a massive construction site on the main road. I'd monitor the project's progress, plot the installation of a fake hippo in one of the giant water-filled potholes it continually widened (not done), and take in the broad monstera leaves and revolving cast of flowering bougainvillea on the way back home. A touchstone graced the end of those walks: a defunct bit of electrical infrastructure that hangs from a pole outside the compound's gate that looks to me like a miniature robot, my own personal Wall-E.
A fresh neighborhood and a twice-a-week commute has jumbled this little ritual, however easily executed (for someone without kiddos) each individual piece is. Our new grid of streets provides many alluring paths. In an effort to start to know the place, my route has varied, no touchstone yet identified. My decisions on timings and trains are still too conscious, not yet instinctual, to permit my mind to wander or to focus on something else. For a compulsive reader, I've turned very few pages in the last month. And too often, I find myself foregoing these anchors (call it meh-ditation), at precisely a moment when I desire more ties. Other rituals aren't so transferable: a dawa at the Adams Arcade Java House after I check my P.O. Box, noodles and recycling on Sundays at the Kilimani Farmers Market, browsing the bookstore at Yaya Centre after a haircut across the hall.
But at moments like these of transition and (minor) loss, I've found I can more acutely feel the shift from the discomfort of newness to the comfort of familiarity—how the second week of trips from Union (DC) to Penn Station (Baltimore) feels so much less anxious than the first, and how in that shift I begin to notice little joys. For some, routine might seem the opposite of spontaneity, but for me it is a structure from which spontaneity can grow, a worn path along which serendipity can be found.
So, do send along your recommendations for mainstays in DC, as well as candidates for derivations from their solidity. While you're at it, take a look at
my op-ed in Jacobin on housing proposals in the latest New York State budget from March, which draws on learnings from my book—release date currently set for February 11th, 2025! Good to be back, at least, to this routine.