The style pages of W Magazine and a year working at Conde Nast would endeavor to persuade any girl that a wardrobe does a woman make. But despite the bulging closets, immobility and the regularity of life was disheartening.
It was for that reason that in November, I’d just about had it with Istanbul. It wasn’t the people or the environment – just a strange sense of claustrophobia. The high of the summer had worn off and the transition to winter was tainted with low menacing skies, dark clouds bearing down on the tops of the cities hills. The open rooftop cafes and terrace bars were covered over and access to the grand expanse of the Istanbul skyline was lost to a haze of cigarette smoke in dark pubs. Even the warm wool sweaters and scarves of winter hung heavily as I trudged away in a habituated pattern towards winter.
I’ve never experienced autumn this way. In the past it was a season I look forward to, for it was the season that brought about the most change. Despite the fact that it meant the return to school, homework, and occasional all-nighters, it was always an opportunity to reinvent and start fresh.
I spent most of my college years chasing change. I found myself fleeing from commitment to any particular institution, and it took a year at Newcastle University, a year at Boston University, and a year working for Conde Nast before I’d flitted about enough to buckle down and finish my final two years of higher education in one place. But autumn was always the detonating time, setting off a flurry of activity and a sense of anticipation.
But this year there would be no such thrill as the colder months rolled in. And despite the beautiful Indian summer we were experiencing in Istanbul, and the excitement of an impending trip home, I was finding it hard to stay positive about the city. I muddled through October and November with a sense of gloom and dissatisfaction, eagerly anticipating Thanksgiving and a return to the states. I had all but booked tickets to check out for good by March or April, looking forward to a spring in a new environment. Breathe in new air, explore and understand new surroundings, and get high on the fumes of change.
Strangely though, after two weeks in U.S., I returned to Istanbul refreshed and exhilarated. It was completely instinctive, much the same you might experience getting off a train at Grand Central station in New York. There, the rush of energy flows forth from a thousand heeled shoes and loafers on marble, reverberating through the arches and sparking all who enter its halls with a New York dynamism. The bustle of Taksim Square at rush hour has a similar effect. I stepped off the bus revitalized, sucking down the fresh exhaust of a hundred taxis and buses sitting in perpetual traffic, tasting oily doner kebabs and roasted chestnuts on the air, buzzing with the commotion. I lugged my 50 pound suitcase all the way home, down the bumpy streets of Cihangir, narrowly dodging taxis and stray cats, and listening as the street-side knife sharpener and the junk-trolley-man yell incoherently over taxi horns and screeching breaks. The familiar had aroused a deep satisfaction that had been lost before. I couldn’t wait to climb up to my cozy tree house apartment and say hello to Percy the resident seagull, take in the view, and like the current on the Bosporus, like the feet at Grand Central station, and the rising exhaust from the cars in Taksim square, move.
My roommate lives by the motto, “don’t settle.” Don’t settle on a job you don’t like. Don’t stay in one place for too long. Life gets boring when we fall into routine. Familiarity becomes easy, and we forget to challenge ourselves, to take initiative and to explore the endless options set out before us. Change becomes scary, and we shy away from opportunities because what we have seems satisfactory, even if it isn’t. The more we challenge and expose ourselves, the more we learn, and the more addictive it becomes. I often return to the words that brought me here in the first place, which inspired me then and continue to today: “concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too.” Once we’ve taken the initiative, more opportunities arise, inspiring and coercing us to keep moving, keep progressing, keep changing. Our lives become all the more fulfilled.
Third Eye Blind once told me “you've got to steal time from the life that's passing by,” and it’s true. I believed I’d done enough just by moving here. But that was only the beginning, and the clock keeps ticking. I won’t be in Istanbul forever, and this dynamic and vibrant city is on the verge of such monumental changes that it will never be the same again. We only have the present.