I’m sitting in my favorite place, Elizabeth St. Garden, about ten minutes from my place in New York City. The wind chimes above me are blowing in the breeze, and there are countless statues and people luxuriating in the peace. It feels like Paris.

It blows my mind that I get to live down here. I never really experienced this part of New York before moving here — Nolita, Lower East Side, Chinatown, East Village. The vibe has that Euro charm but with this American grit and flair.

A few hours later and I’m sitting at a cafe on the street, a non-alcoholic beer on the table, the World Cup on the TV. It’s halftime, and I’m facing the street. I’m so glad to be in a city where I can just sit at a cafe on a charming sidewalk and watch life go by, scribbling for hours. It’s my favorite thing in the world to do.

It’s been over a month since I’ve put the story of my life into words
the break has been nice
trying to experience being here
without the pressure to make something of it
But it’s not just a pressure
it’s a never-ceasing itch to transmute living into majesty
not for you, for me, or for any living being
but a mirror for life to see itself

There’s nothing to prove, especially to myself

So much has happened
I’ve been with my friends
I’ve gone through some shit
I’ve felt so much love, have accomplished some things
and have felt young in heart and body
I feel young in the pit of my soul
a humble appreciation
for each day

It all happens far too fast to try to
grasp or understand
it can be scary
time falling away like sand
through my hands
but when I let go of trying to catch it
I fall with time
I let go of any sense of control
where it becomes bliss to fall
in love
in pain
in the arms of family and friends
hands fall into one another
fingers tickle heart strings
I fall like the tears on my face
I cry for the chance to be weightless
slow down
I fall
with nothing to hold onto
into another sunny day

Thunderheads and blue skies
since we last spoke the weather’s comprised
enveloping the New York City skyline
and ripping through
the days and nights of me
completely stewed in gratitude
I’ve never felt quite like this

The city’s dripped out in World Cup soccer jerseys. It’s beautiful to see people from different countries repping their home. Each country has its swag, its color, its identity, and they meld together on this canvas of personality.

It’s the spirit of the times, and I try to capture it, express it, illustrate what it all means to me, so here’s my vibrant rain-soaked summary.

I think about being a kid. My brother and I were obsessed with soccer. In the early ’00s, sports had this rebellious swag, baggy kits and players like Thierry Henry and Ruud van Nistelrooy, Kobe Bryant and Andy Irons, my guys. I think about the things I love, and they’re what I loved in childhood.

It was my eight-year-old dream to be a painter.
I’ve been painting
expressing myself through color —
the clothes I wear and
the paint on the canvas
a bleeding spectrum of love and light

I think I liked Picasso because I had this book, Picasso and Matisse, where the artists were animals, a pig and a bull, and when I think about that book I think about curiosity and creation and the man that I’ve become. All I want to do is make something real that elucidates the life I’ve had and the way I see and the man that I hope I can be.

I’m fucking happy.

I’ve never had an apartment that felt so much like me. It’s small, but it’s beautiful and has everything I need. In the summer heat I can’t stay in there very long, but the city’s my living room, so I step outside into the boundless potential of this epic place; can go anywhere, do anything, just start walking, running, biking, flying. Go. Be. Live. See.

I think I’m thriving, like the plants in my dojo that I care about growing. The fruits of my life are sprouting from sowing. Ask me again if I know where I’m going. Naw, but I know where I am cause I feel the wind blowing. Sun glowing. Heart pulsing. Time slowing.

It’s been an absolute adventure to get to where I am. It hasn’t been easy. The challenges have made me closer to my friends and family. We keep getting stronger together, my greatest teachers.

It feels like I’m part of something I can’t truly grasp.

Living in New York at this particular time in history and just being alive. Four months into living here, and I’m meeting the coolest fucking people.

I get up with the sun so I can catch the city’s eyes dust off last night’s rest; do the streets ever sleep? Do they rest their eyes at twilight, or does the moon compose a nightly symphony to walk to, made of golden counters and white-hot shadow?

Tokyo had the same energy, yet I felt like an outsider, there to observe.

Here, I’m a part of it. I guess it’s called community. Seeing familiar faces every day in the neighborhood, saying waddup to my tattoo artist on a street corner in the pouring rain, or May at the laundromat, this tiny woman with no teeth who barely speaks English and makes me laugh every time I drop off my laundry — she feels like she has to give me something extra if I tip her, so I’ve received a couple of toy chupacabras, oranges, and warm sparkling water.

I got the homies I play basketball with, my friends at the gym, and the baristas I’ve gotten to know. The city’s massive, but you live in a neighborhood, and in that neighborhood you start to appreciate the people who imbue it with life. I guess I’m one of ‘em.

I did stand-up comedy after I met a new homie at a block party in my neighborhood. We were listening to jazz on the sidewalk and somehow decided to do stand-up comedy together. A week later, I did my first five-minute set, telling a recent dating story that fucked me up a little. But it’s all good; everything was meant to be.

If we got our friends and our health, we got it all. If we got our breath, our heartbeat, a place to rest our thoughts; if we have a moment’s rest, a hug, a cry, we got it all. We got life, we’re here, and it’s so fucking beautiful.

The breeze, the decadence of ice cream, the lyrics of laughter, the silly look in a lover’s eyes, a nonsensical conversation with a complete stranger, a giggly baby, a pull-up, two, ten, early mornings in the gym and late nights at the pizza shop surrounded by others going through it too, but we’re here, we’re a little fucked up, we’re in the greatest city in the world, happy to be alive.

I walk through the city singing and dancing; it helps me keep moving.

The summer wind’s delicious. When I run down the West Side Highway at six p.m. as the sun’s going down, endorphins pumping, sweating hard in the salty heat and passing countless people, I thank God to be thirty, healthy, strong, alive. It’s like life hasn’t even started, yet so much has happened!

I love living in a place — living a type of life — where every day is a chance to have an adventure. Push myself, learn something new, speak up, say hello. That’s the fucking adventure, man.

I’ve been super into this podcast Pinch My Salt, by this surf legend Sterling Spencer. He’s absolutely hilarious — I call him a medicinal podcaster because listening to him and my other favorite Theo Von is medicine for me.

Sterling talks about turning forty, and how in his twenties all he cared about was winning contests, being sponsored, getting girls, ego-driven worries and cares. But then he had a gnarly brain injury, and everything changed.

He’s realized that all that matters is health, the people we love, and the time we get to spend with them on Earth.

The podcast is about surfing, and it’s interesting how this podcast came into my life at this moment in time. He was a pro surfer back in the day, and in high school my friends were obsessed with him.

They were all surfers and I wasn’t as much, so I didn’t care. But fifteen years later I can’t get enough because he connects me with who I am — a California kid who grew up in the ocean. It connects me with my best friends, my hometown, my brother, and myself. In this city where you can be anyone, Sterling keeps me close to who I’ve always been.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to appreciate surfing more and more. I’ve had some of the greatest moments of my life surfing and am craving it right now. But I’ve also realized that basketball is my surfing. It’s my spiritual place, and I’ve been playing more than ever before.

Recently, I was at this park on the Lower East Side. It feels like Hong Kong with big glistening trees, teams practicing kung fu routines, and people playing mahjong and ping-pong. It’s a vibe.

I was shooting around and this kid came up to me and asked if he could shoot. He was like six years old, and I said sure. We played for a bit, and another kid came up and asked the same thing. I said, you two play one-on-one. They’re going at it and I’m the ref, then the kid’s dad came and we played two on two.

It was sick. And then I got into a game of four on four with a bunch of homies. I was hitting threes, kinda going off. They were calling me cheat code!

When I was in chronic pain throughout my twenties, I couldn’t imagine having basketball in my life like this again. Yet I never lost faith.

I’ve had this thought: something’s gotta bring you down, right? You’ll get sick, or injured, or something bad will happen; it can’t just be good and getting better?

But life is just getting better. I don’t want to make myself believe that I have to go down, that I can’t stay up and continue rising; am I scared of thriving? I wanna be the best man that I can be. And that means bringing other people up, helping where I can, being a good person.

I think I’m doing my best, just being myself, making art, working on my passion, and pursuing a new career that I care about.

Last week I passed my certification to be a personal trainer.

I passed the test last Wednesday, which was the start of a pretty insane week. I’ve never studied so hard for a test in my life, a few hours nearly every day for over a month. It’s felt pretty fucking cool to actually learn about the human body, the different muscles and systems and how to train them. The body is insaneeeeeee.

How this stuff is taking place inside every one of us, constant renewal and death, the intricacies of the heart, different chambers and atriums, as if the things we feel in our chest are birds trying to break free, and maybe that’s what they are.

Back musculature is so cool. Layers like the crusts of Earth, stacked from the spine. There’s so much going on at the spine, so many muscle layers in there, all working together in infinitesimal ways every single moment.

I’ve been workin’ on my ass. The ass is everything, the ol’ gluteus maximus — that thing does it all. But I didn’t realize there’s the gluteus minimus and gluteus medius, more on the side of your thigh. I didn’t actually know what the thigh was, but it’s the upper portion of our leg, the quads on the front and the hamstrings on the back.

I made it through a decade of pain to arrive at this place of utmost gratitude; now I’m thankful for every ache, every gain, every chance to get up and train again, because so many people aren’t so lucky.

I’ve never been stronger as an athlete. I get up every day psyched to hit the gym. It’s the only place in the world that truly makes sense to me. When all else fails, that’s where I go. I need to see other people, get the shit out of me physically, and alter my mindset.

The gym has saved me countless times. When I’m going through something emotionally, it’s all there is. I want to make it a safe and healing place for others, too, as a trainer.

I hope to make training my art.

I’m not permanently done with the chronic symptoms I endured for eight years. They still come and go, but their intensity is a fraction of what it used to be, and I know they are mindbody symptoms, not anything to actually do with the breakdown of my body. So I ignore them and they fade; I embrace instead of fear; I keep moving forward.

It’s a gift just to be able to walk. To run. To hoop. To jump. To feel anything at all. I’m using what I learned while in pain to help others who are going through what I’ve been through, and I can already see that I’m affected lives. It’s astounding.

Just to help one fucking person makes it all worth it, because I would have given anything for somebody just to help me when I was in the tunnel. And so many people did. I have infinite gratitude for them.

I went to a Kevin Morby show the night I passed the test to celebrate, and it was cathartic. His new album got me through some shit recently. I love going to shows solo. I can just dance and sing my little fucking heart out. When he sang Badlands, Javelin, and 100,000 back to back from his recent album, I lost my mind.

Morby sang like the devil and I tried to match his energy. We were ripping. It’s hard to put into words what it’s like seeing an artist live whose music got you through a difficult season.

Music holds me together.

Morby is a poet. I see myself on the same level as these artists, creating our thing in different ways, expressing what life means to us. Not that there’s a level — people are just people, and that’s what I hope to see and treat them as. Artists make life a little sweeter for the rest of us. They ease the pain in themselves, and that healing carries on the summer wind.

On Saturday morning in my apartment, I cried listening to a song playing on the speaker, “Quiet Noise,” by Voxtrot. They’ve been one of my favorite bands since high school. I saw them for the first time a couple of months ago here in NY, and it changed my life.

Concerts are everything. I mean I love going with people, yet when solo, it’s just you with this connection to something so personal and profound that only you truly know the depth of, as you’ve heard this song while crying in an empty restaurant, or belting the lyrics in your car, or having sex to, and you’re there, and you can dance, and scream, and cry if need be with nobody there who expects you to keep it together.

Morby healed me — Voxtrot too.

I cried because the song goes:

If you see me, you don’t know the pain I’ve gone through. That smile on my face is because I’m just grateful to be here, alive with you, humbled by every challenge.

I’m better than I’ve ever been, and it’s because of what I’ve overcome.

I sang the lyrics and started to cry and went over to the couch and hugged one of my best friends who was staying with me. He didn’t see it coming. I was drinking cold coffee and we were in our boxers. I’m so fucking lucky.

That night the Knicks basketball team won the playoffs, which was ludicrous. The city felt like a music festival, with everybody in the streets, boomboxes on every corner, revelry and electricity ripping through every crack and seam of the concrete.

I finished the third draft of my book on Japan. It’s my story. I’m so proud of it, and I know it’s only going to get better, but it’s something that nobody but me could create, and no matter what happens with it, I know that I’ve put into it everything regarding my connection with Japan, and I think it’s pretty cool, a story that I’d be interested to read, an inadvertent guide to the country.

I love my life with all my fucking heart. I love that I don’t know where it’s gonna go, or how things are gonna turn out, but I know things will be just fine. Of course there will always be ups and downs, but that’s life, that’s the adventure, that’s what makes it interesting!

I watched an awesome Rich Roll video recently where he talks about slowing down and having a long-term perspective: the tortoise versus the hare.

I’m trying to have that perspective in my own life, seeing personal training as a long-term career and not needing everything to happen now.

I know that I’m moving in a direction because I have these two things that matter to me and I’m pursuing them, writing and training. Every day I do what seem like small acts but are actually everything, because they give my day direction, they fill me with joy, and they progress the plot.

I love writing books. One day I’d love to focus all of my attention just on that. But I know that could take an unlimited amount of time. And so I work on my book most days because it makes me happier, and it’s the one thing I gotta do to get to where I want to go.

Two rules to stay sane:

Don’t compare

Don’t judge

I have no clue where anything is gonna go. My motto has been I ain’t know shit about shit. I just don’t know what’s really going on. So I go to my favorite places, the Russian Baths on the Lower East Side, where I take a cold plunge and bake in the sauna like they’ve been doing for centuries.

I go to the river and lie on the wooden plank at the end of the pier. I started dancing with a group of shufflers the other day when I was on my run with the sun going down, and just dancing at the end of the pier. That sums up my life here. I’m gonna learn how to shuffle.

I’ve never been so sure
That I’m right where I’m supposed to be