Accommodation, according to Webster:

1) something supplied for convenience or to satistfy a need;

2) a public conveyance (as a train) that stops at all or nearly all points;

3) the automatic adjustment of the eye for seeing at different distances by changes in

the convexity of the crystalline lens; also, the range over which such adjustment is

possible.

The price of being open to believing anything is its natural endpoint: believing in nothing. We live in a world, and I live in a city, where open-minded tolerance is such a glorified principle that we forget what it really means, what it looks like in personal practice: a lack of commitment to any one thing; a twisting in the wind; an absence of passion about any idea accept the vilification of those who don’t operate under such “enlightenment”.

The problem lies not in accepting that other people may have viewpoints different from our own; it lies in using this acceptance as an excuse to not form and follow our own belief system. An excuse to just be along for the ride rather than preparing your own itinerary. It is adjustment to whatever the world offers. It is emptiness decorated with fancy words and placed on a pedestal in the town square. It is a train that stops at all points but has no home base. It is a reaction to the world around us, a shifting of shape, a concession for convenience. Glorified weakness.

We walk around in our indecision, in our lack of intention toward life, and wonder why we are so frustrated. Day after day of the same activities. Sitting in front of a computer screen blinding our eyes with whatever the information superhighway has to offer us today. We sit back and wait for the world to change our lives, to make something happen for us. And we wonder why we are bored. Cradled by our desk chairs, wondering when passion will show up. We approach our lives in the resignation of accommodation because commitment requires too much risk and effort. We are living out of a place where our needs must be met rather than out of a recognition that we are designed with a purpose that will not be revealed to us on our living room couch; it will only be revealed by actually LIVING. And living requires us to get up, to take chances, to make plans, to risk ourselves (hearts, comfort, rejection, disapproval) in the belief that there is a point to us, in the faith that there is more than this. We will not be motivated to live with intention (and all the uncertainty that comes with it) if our highest goal remains to believe in anything instead of in one thing. When we start to believe, when we commit to ourselves by choosing a path rather than wandering around in only the area in front of us, the world changes. We see relationships instead of people. We see opportunities instead of defeat. We see hope instead of fear. It’s the difference between making a choice and standing still. We can go on surviving, or we can actually be alive.

Here’s the thing about living in a city of eight million people: you never get away from them.
I can only speak for the South, since that’s the only other place I’ve lived (besides a brief stint in Boca Raton, but as we all know: FLORIDA DOES NOT COUNT AS THE SOUTH. Especially South Florida.) The way of life I’m used to is walking from house to car, car to work, car to grocery store, car to church, etc. When you do interact with other people, you can always make a quick getaway if necessary. Jump in said car, run across a field, slam a door behind you–plus, there is plenty of space available to put distance between yourself and other people when you just want to be alone. In New York, you walk up a few flights of stairs to your shoebox apartment and try to not hear your neighbor’s pulsating fiesta music next door when you want some “me” time–good luck. Outside the city, a person has time to relax and regroup between interactions with others. Did someone make you mad? (A post office employee, perhaps?) Did someone say the wrong thing? Was someone (gasp) RUDE? Then ride in your air-conditioned car to your air-conditioned home, where you can sit at your picture window as you sip a glass of iced tea and GET OVER IT. Here, it’s a little different. You bang into people all day, and there’s really no escaping it. What it does, though, is keep things real. There’s no time or space to be fake. Human interaction is reduced to the blatant, cold, hard truth. You find out what people are like when they are stripped of all pretense. It can be both the scariest and most refreshing thing you ever experience.
The deal is, we are all such broken people. No matter how well we clean up for company, there are cracks beneath our surface veneer that we want no one to see. None of us has escaped without wounds from life thus far. Through our own mistakes and the mistakes of others, we are banged, bruised, and scarred. We deal with each other out of our own stories, out of our own wounds. Which means we deal with each other so imperfectly. We wound each other further. Our rough, broken edges collide with another’s rough, broken edges and though we both try to pretend that we’re doing OK, we’re just fine, thank you–we’re not. We’re raw. People here are a little more tired of hiding that. Their rawness lies closer to the surface. There’s an element of truth to that interaction that is unnerving and liberating.
Someone was asking me the other day if my relationships in the city were not as deep as my other relationships due to the fast pace and the transitory nature of the population here. I had to think for about two seconds before I realized why that wasn’t at all the case. Relationships in the city share an almost inexplicable bond. There is certainly the sense of not having much time, but that serves to make people take seriously what time they do have. We are like war buddies who navigate this insane place together. Plus, there is the added dimension of each person’s reason for being here: most of us are searching for something we couldn’t seem to find anywhere else. That makes us allies. There is a layer of that carefully prepared veneer that just doesn’t hold up in the city–it crumbles soon after you get here. Fake doesn’t last long when you keep crashing into people. And that’s when you realize something important…
Maybe if people quit pretending they were perfect, they would actually know each other.