City Vibes

This week I traveled 3,000 miles, the farthest away I’ve been from home, diagonally across the country from the east coast of Florida to the west coast of Washington. I am writing this post from Seattle.

It is beautiful here. Everywhere I turn, the view looks like a postcard. Pictures don’t do it justice.

I was expecting to come to a city and be overwhelmed with infrastructure, the lack of nature, and the accompanying impatience of its inhabitants. Luckily, my expectations have been thrown for a loop.

While considering places to live, I always expected to have to compromise–to either get the populated city full of opportunity at the cost of living in a concrete trap–or get the beautiful rural area at the cost of being socially isolated… I never considered a place like Seattle existing.

Trees are always present to balance out any hard edges from the buildings. This city is organic.

The hills give the city layout a dynamic quality resembling a forest. I am a humble inhabitant, a rabbit, wide eyed and hopping along the forest floor. To my pleasant surprise, the strangers on the street are not predators out to hunt me down, but simply friends I haven’t met yet. The spontaneous conversations are jovial to a fault.

What’s your city’s vibes?

The first thing I noticed with this area is it’s infectious positive vibe. People move without rushing and are polite to a fault. This is a pleasant change from how closed off I’m used to experiencing people as.

I had a profound experience while doing the most mundane activity: ordering food at a mall. The single guy running the restaurant I ordered from handed my food to me with such care, that it threw me back. I had never seen that much care put into mall food. I’m so used to people hating their jobs and being mentally absent, and seeing the quality of anything ordered suffer because of it, but here people are overflowing with pride in their work in such a way that they glow. Even if it is “just mall food.”

Look at the water

Considering that as human beings we are made up mostly of water, I have a feeling that an area’s vibes is closely linked with how water affects (or doesn’t affect) the surrounding area’s terrain.

In Florida, Brevard is flat and swamp-like, so after a rain, water sits. This stagnant energy is reflected in how the area is most popular among retired individuals looking to settle down. Its residents want to sit just like the water. The negative of this stagnant energy is that for the people not looking to settle down, like young adults, it can feel like a trap, just like the water that isn’t moving.

Washington, on the other hand, takes the rainwater on a journey, going down hills and waterfalls, through rivers and streams, until eventually pouring into one of its many lakes. This abundance of water supercharges the fertile soil that supports a wide variety of plants–trees, bushes, ferns, flowers, vines…

The energy of this area’s water movement is again reflected in its most common resident: young adults who have moved to the area for work. People here are spontaneous and growing fast just like the abundance of plant-life surrounding them.

Urban design

I have developed a respect for Seattle’s city government that takes care to enhance the quality of living here in a number of ways.

They have intervened a number of times to keep beautiful areas from being over-developed. Instead of more strip malls or hotels, the areas are preserved as parks.

This attention to detail extends to the downtown market, where artistic entrepreneurship is literally built into the foundation.

This concrete walkway has tables built in. They extend out and can be used as makeshift booths for selling goods, and many artists are set up there around the clock

Families also benefit from this intentional design. One of the first things I noticed here is how children are so much calmer and parents are so much happier than I’m used to seeing. I had gotten so accustomed to seeing hyper children and stressed out parents, usually in the process of scolding said children, that I saw this as the way of life. But Seattle has given a lot of thought into designing solutions specifically for families, and the positive results can be seen right on their smiling faces.

One of these solutions can be found at a Family Lounge by the mall bathroom. It has comfortable chairs for adults and children, some toys, a TV, as well as a few quiet rooms, which can be used for breast feeding or calming a child down.

Also in the mall food court is a Family Dining Area, an enclosed section with small tables and chairs easy for children to use.

The city is abundant with solutions like this.

Growth

At any given time, the skyline is populated with about a dozen cranes adding on to the city. This is a booming area full of intentional design and creative solutions. It makes me happy seeing so many resources being put to good use.

My euphoria may be because I’ve only been here a week, but I can’t escape the positive energy here. Where back in Brevard I feel like I can really only add value to the small business community as a graphic or web designer, there are so many more kinds of communities that I could integrate myself into here, that in Seattle I feel like I can be anything I want…

I feel bad for people who have grown up here and don’t realize how good they have it, for people who don’t realize how many opportunities are available to them, and so they keep passing them up. I am grateful for the opportunity to have come out here and am taking it for all it’s got.