Listening for the Click

I decided to move to Tokyo in the space of 13 seconds.

“I have some crazy news,” says my boyfriend. His voice is eager, and a little crackly from being in Nova Scotia, where he’s fly-fishing with his dad. “I just checked my messages—there’s no service up here. Anyway, Carl called from the company. A spot opened up in Tokyo. And somehow someone put me on a list and they decided to give me a shot and—I leave in two weeks!”

“Wait, wha–!?” My fingers are buzzing and I’m laughing with disbelief. “Really? Wait, what? Ahhhhhhh!” I can barely get a sentence out, but it’s been 13 seconds, and I’ve already made the decision. I’m going to Tokyo.

I live for these moments, what I call click moments, of being faced with a decision so big that it elicits an intense-adrenaline filled reaction, a jolt, that narrows down options to only one clear choice. I embrace the rarity of these moments where decisions are so unclouded and clear. It’s these jolt-click moments that have the potential to change an entire life path and I can’t help but trust in them. The shock sends my body into fight or flight mode with either a, “Yes, yes, yes” (tingling, laughing, joy-fear) or a crushing “No way, absolutely not, not doing it,” (tears, head-shaking, fear-fear. I know my limits).

It’s a feeling that leads to decisions like hang-gliding in Switzerland on my birthday and missing my flight from Zurich to London to Home (May 13th 2000, sunrise, Swiss Alps) or leaving my boyfriend of three years to sing with a Brooklyn artist collective band in Berlin (July 2005, dusk, NYC). It’s the feeling that made me drop out of college in my junior year to study acting (Fall 1999, middle of the night, dorm room), and made me crash a Journalism Department mixer to convince the faculty that they should take on a Sociology Master’s student with zero journalism experience (December 2007, cocktail hour, Boston). And the jolt-click feeling is the reason that I’m writing from Tokyo, after lunch, April of 2008.

These defining moments, while exhilarating and inspiring, also have a long trail of hard work. Missing my flight meant running out of money and being so wracked with worry that I locked myself in a public bathroom for a few hours, before begging a travel agent in Zurich to talk to the German officials to get me on another flight. Convincing journalism professors that I could take graduate level classes meant playing catch up, reading furiously, asking stupid questions, and letting people actually read and critique my work. It meant falling in love with a very hard profession that won’t buy me a Benz any time soon.

In Tokyo, I do not speak the language, I do not have a work visa or a job and I am living on my savings. (Somewhere in my past I had the good sense to work for a lawyer and put some money away.) In Tokyo I miss the following things: authentic Mexican food, people who laugh at my really stupid jokes, and American directness that I only appreciate when I miss it. In Tokyo I am confronted with the difficulty of culture shock, uncertainty, anxiety and loneliness.

But then there are the trains that run on-time, the spectacular works of art served at every meal, the heated toilet seats, and the thrill of trying out a new language. I revel in the small success of asking a musician, “When music,” an impersonated gesture of the man playing his horse-head violin, “Thoughts what?” I shrug and widen my eyes inquisitively, “Babies? Sky? Love?” And grin widely as I listen to his complicated answer. Though I cannot pull out words I understand, I am smiling and almost crying because I am being spoken to as if I understand. I nod and I am rewarded with one familiar word, “Feelings.”

There is walking in a new city. Finding corners and benches and shops and scenes that seem placed just to remind me of what magic can be found in newness. These moments and places seem orchestrated just for me, and give me a sense of this being “my” city. A nighttime stroll down a wide avenue shows cherry trees heavy with pink blossoms that have bloomed literally overnight. Picnickers eat and drink and laugh under the trees, and with our appetites whetted, we head towards restaurants. All seem closed until we turn a corner onto a little street and see a paper lantern and sliding doors. We peek in and find a bustling, packed neighborhood bar serving grilled meat on sticks. The boisterous business men lean over and feed us pieces of their dishes, tell us what to order, and eventually buy us drinks, saying, “We are the same! John Lennon Imagine! ‘There’s no countries!’ We are the same!”

Being plunged, or plunging myself, into brand new situations gives me a sense of movement that is both difficult and worth living for. I love the challenge of it and the genuine sense of possibility it brings. In the balance of taking an uninformed leap and the real consequences of the leap, regret seems, well regrettable. It seems to dilute the intensity of the decision, of that jolt-click moment. When I think of regrets, I regret most of the times that I have ignored the thrum of “Yes” or the discord of “No, no, no.”

I have friends who shake their heads when they hear of one of my new adventures saying, “From anyone else I would be surprised, but from you, I guess I would’ve expected it.” Or laughing with, “I could never do that!” But I don’t believe it takes any bravery. I don’t believe that it’s something I can do that no one else can do. Everyone’s had the experience of choosing to take a different route home and running into an old friend. The meeting seems surprising, fortuitous, and very worth the small disruption in routine. All it takes is listening for that click and following where it leads. The landscapes may seem strange, and there may be a feeling of vertigo, but the experience is well worth the leap.

Katrina Grigg-Saito is a writer from Boston, living in Tokyo. She received her Master’s in Journalism and Sociology from Boston University and writes for Metropolis Magazine in Tokyo.

~Katrina Grigg-Saito