Having to run when you want to stroll

The Italians have a term for it: fare una passeggiata. And it refers to that beautiful, languid trip down the street, or around the piazza, or through the park: when your feet stick to and pull off the pavement, every step felt in your arches, the world passing in perfect time. The scene changes ever so slowly, like the turning of an ancient crank, and celestial bodies hover the way they're meant to, in ideal suspension. 

There's a time and place for the frenetic, but the aftermath - the winding down - is always jarring. I have just come off of two spectacular trips to major cities that have inspired entire canons of art, literature, music, film since their inception. Cities that have loomed large on my imaginative horizon since before I could ever conceive of visiting them. And despite all my efforts to relish every moment in them, they have since passed through my existence, leaving their sparkling contrails. Never the less spectacular for having been brief. But it is the splashdown back into familiar waters that invariably shakes me. Waking up in my bed again, having breakfast at home, going on facebook, doing homework...the droplets of an adventure evaporating rapidly from my skin. I'm left wondering where it all went and if I could have better preserved it, all the while turning one eye to the days ahead, and all that has to and will be done. This is a common theme in my life, this tension of paces, but one that has been magnified by concentrated travel. Of course, I am infinitely appreciative - to the point of incredulity and cognitive dissonance - of having such a "struggle" to contend with. I just wonder if I will be forever tumbling from one experience to the next...

The two cities in discussion are London and Rome, both of which captured my heart and mind in such drastically different ways. I will work to find words to describe them.