As I left my cobble-stoned comfort zone in the West Village, I glanced over my shoulder to the water. Past the French Bulldogs, the almond milk lattes, the noisy taxis, and the towering buildings that don’t just scrape the sky but pierce through the clouds, I found myself on the Williamsburg Bridge. As I stood there on the threshold between Brooklyn and this strange place I call “home away from home,” it hit me – My perception of this chaotic, dirty city, where people weave through each other like ants, suddenly changed. Right before my eyes, the concrete jungle where dreams are made of, as someone once put it, extraordinarily transformed from an oversaturated mecca of clichéd chaos to a rhythmic island in the sun. I came to realize that what we see is not as significant as from where we see it. Perspective trumps the thing itself. If we open our minds and our hearts to a reality far from the reality, if we stand far back enough and look closely enough, the rigidly urban becomes a glistening paradise, and the mundane becomes a spectacle…if you want it to.
