Keep Lookin' Up
A reminder to take a walk.
Lately I’ve been taking neighborhood walks after dinner, right at twilight. It’s that liminal moment when the lights are switched on but shades aren’t yet drawn for the night. Each window is a little vignette, a flash of domestic life. Rooms are illuminated like a living dollhouse, a peek into another world. I see people making dinner, tidying up, feeding the dog, going about their routines. Empty rooms are just as compelling, bookshelves and gallery walls and discarded toys with a sentience all their own. I swear I’m not snooping! It’s just a peripheral glance, an awareness of the life buzzing around me, directly adjacent to my own, yet totally separate.
On last night’s walk, I noticed a window on an upper level I hadn’t seen before. It caught my eye because the room was filled with luminous color-changing lights that morphed from blue to violet to ruby red and back again, like changing channels in the sky. It reminded me to look up, to draw my eyes away from the sidewalk. To notice unexpected surprises like a wooden tiger mask affixed to a tree. To pause at the big yellow house on the corner, solid and sweet like a frosted cake. To listen for the muffled jingle of the N train as it trundles by. To appreciate, like clockwork, the synchronized swim of cars being moved for street cleaning each week. To gauge the weather’s tempestuous changes: yesterday a foggy noir, today balmy and still, with cornflower blue skies.
Visiting New York a few weeks ago, I felt viscerally as though I was in a beehive, tunneling with my fellow commuters under scaffolding and over puddles and into our little gridded habitats, teeming with life. It felt claustrophobic at first, compared to the quieter hive of my SF neighborhood. But after a day or two, I settled in and found it comforting. We are all here, together, alive. My friend Alysha calls it “Proof of Life,” an endearing phrase for when her cat triggers the motion sensor at home or she receives a selfie from a faraway friend. Sometimes I open up Find my Friends just to see their dots nestled safely at home, my very own Marauder’s Map. I feel a tender pang when I receive a Ring notification in New York telling me the back door was just opened at home in San Francisco; I know that at that precise moment, Sam is taking Zip outside, the two of them stretching and bleary-eyed in the morning dew, and I feel a rush of warmth from 3,000 miles away.
I just finished reading The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion. At one point, her husband asserts that the critical ingredient for good writing is having a piece of paper to jot down an idea when it surfaces. Creativity is more about readiness than agency, and taking a walk is one of the best ways to cultivate that receptiveness. Magical Thinking is an intimate, searing portrait of grief, but also, and at least as importantly, a portrait of marriage. Like the windows I walk by each evening, it’s a glimpse into a parallel life, separate from my own but a powerful reminder of our shared humanity.
I used to regularly see an older man on our street, always wearing the same brown fleece and pushing a grocery cart, making his daily pilgrimage to the store. We made friendly eye contact but never exchanged names. A few months ago, I found out that he passed away, that his name was Ron, that he stopped for coffee every morning at our neighborhood cafe. Ron’s car, a well-worn white Buick, lingered on our block long after he was gone. A reminder of his steady presence, his warm energy. Proof of life.
Who are we, to strangers who walk by? The house with the red geraniums on the porch, the 1978 Mercedes parked out front, the feisty speckled dachshund standing guard. Sometimes I step out into the backyard at twilight and look back toward our own windows, the motion picture of our life illuminated and radiant. For a moment, I’m an observer, the cinematic glow of our story playing out in front of me. And then I call Zip to go inside, and we cross back over the threshold into our shared world.
One of my favorite songs, by Kacey Musgraves, goes like this:
Keep lookin’ up
Don’t let the world bring you down
Keep your head in the clouds
And your feet on the ground
On my neighborhood walks and in my life, I remind myself: Keep lookin’ up. Some days it’s harder than others, especially with what’s happening in the world in recent weeks. But I choose to read the memoir about grief and see not just the loss but the singular beauty of what existed before it was gone. A deep human connection. Proof of life. Not my life, but parallel to mine, crossing decades, generations, thousands of miles, intersecting for the briefest moment—a glance through a window, a passage that sings, a reminder that even when we’re apart, we’re in this together.