The rat race isn’t for me. I’m not the biggest fan of packing into the uptown E train like sardines on a sweaty summer day. But I do love my job, and wow, do I love the city. It wasn’t my summer internship working for Al Roker that was an eye-opening experience, rather it was the 20 block hike from Penn Station to the office.

The bustling streets of Manhattan are surprisingly serene. The walk up Ninth Avenue is my absolute favorite. It is quite possibly the only thing to which I give my undivided attention. Probably because it’s the only task that requires me to glance up from a screen (for fear of a head-on collision with other passersby who are much too engrossed in their iThis and iThats.)

For those 27 minutes, I am unplugged from social media and instead, connected to real life social scenarios like greeting bakery owners with a cheerful “good morning!”. I am exited from iTunes and instead, tuned into local street performers swinging eighth notes on the tenor saxophone for a dollar from any kind and impressed stranger. I am unreachable from the world wide web, and instead, pass scores of men and women and children conversing in the most unfamiliar tongues from every corner of the world’s surface. It is undeniably refreshing being incommunicable for 20 blocks, just being an observer in the most interesting city in the world.

One of my favorite ways to pass time while walking to the office is to watch how everyone walks. The business executive shuffle uptown while wide eyed ballerinas canter rhythmically to the Alvin Ailey dance studio. More often than not, though, I pass a young adult tweeting away so immersed in his phone nearly crashing into other robot like commuters pre-programmed with an autopilot navigation system. Amazingly they all trot around avoiding each other more tunnel visioned than a carriage horse with its blinders on.

I feel a sense of pity towards those peers of mine who stroll through New York with their thumbs acting like whack-a-mole hammers on their keyboards. Locals who find it above themselves to listen.

I find peace in horn honking and sidewalk bickering (a privilege many miss out on due to the debilitating diseases of iTunes, Pandora, and Spotify which are only further advanced by the virus of earphones.) I catch the tune that the homeless man on the corner of 9th and 42nd jingles with his cup half full of quarters. I wonder if some people even see him. As I continue uptown, I feel goosebumps slowly rise on my arms and back of my neck as the automatic doors in front of the grocery story fly open and freezing air escapes the produce for a minute. Juxtaposed to the 89 degree, 92 percent humidity of the concrete jungle, I’m in Antarctica. Just walking past Amy’s Bakery makes me salivate as the aroma of freshly baked croissants wafts out the door and lingers a couple blocks up with me.

I could guess that the young intern stumbling down the stairs with coffees stacked on each other is too preoccupied with updating her Facebook status about how she “Just saw Tina Fey on the corner of 9th and 50th OMG” that she doesn’t realize there’s another step. She’ll be face-planting into her boss’s espresso in three... two... oops, she’s down. But I’m already turning onto Fifty Third, with my office key in the door.

While they download, sync, and launch, I reconnect with actuality because I have disconnected from my cracked, beaten up iPhone. I can walk the same street, every day, and see something new. While I walk to work, I often tell myself a line from Mark Strand's 'Keeping Things Whole'. "In a field/I am the absence/ of field." The power of simply being and moving has kept my sense of existence extremely acute. Move through life well aware that you are physically and mentally here; remember that you are part of a whole and take responsibility of occupying a space that could be someone else's. Remember to, as Mark Strand said, "move to keep things whole."