A Week in Chicago: A Photoessay
“If you are walking down the right path and you’re willing to keep walking, eventually you will make progress.” — Barack Obama
The concept of a pathway has always been swirling around in my mind. I think it’s really amusing how as humans, we naturally follow the paths of those before us, sometimes without realizing it. We all have our different motives: some people hike the same trail over and over again as a force of habit, others simply because it’s either. Although I’m not sure where my fascination with paths originated from, I can say with confidence that I have enough pictures of mysterious alleyways, rusting gates and bustling highways to fill up my own personal gallery. Throughout the entirety of immersion week, we combined efforts of combing through both very urban and more rural areas of Chicago to create our paths, as well as following the footsteps of people just like us before we had even conceived the idea of following one.
There is a lot to say about pathways. They can both open up new, undiscovered opportunities for someone while simultaneously steering somebody else off of the path they’d been on before. I see Chicago as one of those “love-hate relationship” kind of oxymorons, because it’s so easy to get physically lost, but it can be just as easy to find something you may have been looking for for quite some time. The city isn’t for everybody, which is understandable. My sister is in love with the suburbs, and I can definitely see her living in a rather small town for the rest of her life.
However, for people like me, who find both the glory and the terror in getting lost, a city is absolutely perfect. Although I tend to hate myself for not being able to navigate the simplest of routes without my Google Maps application open, I can also see the beauty in all the opportunities every single pathway holds for me.
Sometimes (more often than I would like to admit) I find myself going in the completely wrong direction, but being lost in itself has its own charm, and admittedly, I think I’ll be able to find the joy in that as long as I live here.
