As I stepped onto the cold pavement of the streets of New York City I looked out into the vastness ahead of me with my mind askew in thoughts of dejection and wonder. Manhattan: a precipice of movement, of dynamics vested within an island on the edge of America. A place of innovation and fast-forwardness yet rich with history and culture. I look out to a building across the train station I had just exited. It read in bold letters: The New York Times. The building seems somehow cold and welcoming at the same time. An inspiration, an illumination, a shivering reminder of my perpetual writer’s block. …Of my lost sense of productivity, of inspiration, of feeling, of having recently withered down to mere uselessness within my craft.

But the city never sleeps they say. Everything moves fast and those who slow down are lost in the crowd, doomed to drown in the rapidity of the city. However, as I walk these streets I think about the motions of everyone around me. The bustle of the crowds. The agency accompanied by those running from point A to point B at a muted sprint. Perhaps trying to achieve what they want most in life or perhaps trying to achieve nothing at all. They exist separately and all at once. One entity, all with separate lives and original thoughts, views and values. All in motion. Unceasing and continuous. And I am in a stand still. A polar opposite of my surroundings –of what I needed to be as a creator, as a writer.

…but I realize that, although the streets are black and the sky is grey with pollution, the buildings and skyscrapers offer an unwavering stillness in the ever moving city. A literal beacon of hope. Edifices unearthed and built upon decades of creativity and innovation, illuminating the sky, serving as a source of wonder and hope by all those who approach it. A living symbol of not only physical expansion but of man’s ability to take an idea and rise with it. Literally rise with it. Living art. Surviving past the hardness that comes with the city. Past the cold concrete, and grey laden skies.

And now, as I experience the whirring of people as their ideas pass by to and fro from the places they are leaving or headed to, the open space of the home I left seems more like a place of vapid suffocation; a large and gross expansion of nothing. Idle and unproductive. ...The City, it’s antithesis. The commotion and whirring are non-stop. It is persistent and without restraint. An incredible vastness of immortal production. It moves and I move along with it. Like harmony lead by its melody. The city grabs you like a fast moving tide, unwavering and inevitable.

And, though I may be stuck in a standstill of writer’s block, the essence of the ever burgeoning City bids me to produce, to write, to create and to finally move forward. As it grows I grow with it. As it lives and breathes, I do the same. I am drunk by its wonders. By it’s ability to endure the harshest of conditions and to not only survive past it, but to do so with sparkling and resilient fortitude that I did not know had ever existed. To move forward in the face of peril and to never settle for anything less than greatness. That is what The City has taught me. That is the example I have learned to follow.

Finally,

I am inspired.