The View from the Bridge

Pont Bir Hakeim

“Our capacity to draw happiness from aesthetic objects or material goods in fact seems critically dependent on our first satisfying a more important range of emotional or psychological needs, among them the need for understanding, for love, expression and respect.” – Alain de Botton Nearly this same thought, but in a much less eloquent and cohesive way, more like a disturbing grey cloud of uneasy discontentment, occurs to me often as I walk across the bridge next to my house. Le Pont Bir Hakeim, with it’s dazzling view of the gently swaying, murky waters of the Seine, the nearby Eiffel tower, the more distant Sacre Coeur on it’s hilly perch, and to the other side the slightly smaller version of the Statue of Liberty, should normally, and often does, inspire in me an ecstatic thrill, a jolt of energy that courses up from my stomach to transform into a dizzy head rush. My single most favorite feeling in the world, the self-affirming and outrageously optimistic feeling that everything in my life is peachy, and will only become more so with time. A feeling that for the past couple months has most often been accompanied by the thought, “I live in Paris!” But in the doldrums of the winter months, and particularly in the last week of scheduling hell, the bridge does not produce the same heady rush. In fact, the opposite. It instead instigates a dull, impatient, drudgery, a constant rethinking of my mental to-do list, or worse yet, a panicked rethinking of a previous conversation. The beauty of the city around me only reminds me of my unattainable goals for the year. I often confuse a change in place with a personal accomplishment. Physically transporting myself to a foreign country will not fix a nagging sensation of underachievement. Running away to France does not mean leaving my emotional baggage behind in the dust. It will push it into the closet for a moment or two as I settle into my new surroundings, take in the pretty view, but sooner or later it falls out onto the floor at my feet, slowly taking over the entirety of my room, of my new home away from the old one. But the upside to the sad destruction of the urban beauty by my personal drudgery, is that when I have moments of clarity, connection, comfort, the splendor returns in even more stunning glory. The walk home after a triumphant job interview, a good date, a nice meal with a good friend, the view is breathtaking, and that heady rush is even more powerful than it was when I arrived.