I’m also thinking of recycling this for Georgetown’s open-ended essay.
Describe a place or environment where you are perfectly content. What do you do or experience there, and why is it meaningful to you?
It’s just after daybreak. Slanted rays of sunlight peer into my hotel room through gaps in the window shades, projecting oblong shapes across the floor. I awaken surprisingly buoyant. Instead of lazily dragging myself out from under the covers, I look forward to my day and savor the intense aura I already feel reverberating through me. Stepping out into the nippy morning air, I survey the tranquil, still slumbering street before beginning the uphill trek to my destination, Sultanahmet Park.
I’ve only been in Istanbul for three days. But maybe three days was all you needed to gyrate your perspective, to spin it on its head. There was something odd about the way I began to kick off my mornings. Little things began to bring me such immense pleasure. Beloved became the sound of my shoes as they scraped against the old city cobblestone in the still dawn air, rivaled only by the chirping of happy, Turkish birds. I stole glances at passing Turkish teens clad in uniform and linked at the elbow, some clutching notebooks to their chests, others with their lips puckered around cigarettes. I pondered exactly how much we were alike, despite a world of cultural differences. Yet this all was only the walk to my journey’s end, and each morning it was a sublime experience in itself.
To say that Sultanahmet Park is a sight for sore eyes might be a tad understating. Overlooked by the looming, glorious Hagia Sophia on its left, and the sanctified Blue Mosque on its right, the park is a tantalizing maze of hydrangea gardens, winding pathways, and oak and taut-iron benches. But it isn’t its aesthetics that set Sultanahmet apart from the other places I’ve been. While seated my first morning at one of the benches strewn across the wide acres of the park, I came to an alarming realization: my mind was devoid of thoughts. I wasn’t thinking about my quarter progress tests or my friends or what I would have for lunch that day. I wasn’t thinking at all, which seemed a bit incredulous. I am a person who, as I like to say, ‘lives in my own head’, my thoughts a steady but endless stream of hopes and dreams, reminiscences and regrets, a map of who I was, who I am, and who I hope to be.
But the space seemed to silence the traffic in my mind. Seated there, at that bench, I got to see myself and others in a more lucid way than I previously ever could. Gazing at the other people milling through the park that early morning, I separated in my mind the tourists from the locals, the refugees from the people who thought of themselves as ‘just passing through’, even though they’d raised generations here. I was filled with a sense that in the park, no one belonged more than the other, and that everyone understood that. I spent the next few hours in the park merely sitting there, not really sensing the need to do anything else, or engage in conversation. And so began a tradition; every morning before street vendors took residence in the park, I sat at a bench and just was. The only things my brain processed were the chatter of birds, the aroma of Turkish tea wafting from a café nearby as it opened to start its business day, the dawn sunlight bathing every surface in colors brighter than anything I’d ever seen.
Now 300 miles away from the park ⎯ a park in which I have undergone a transformation I never would have anticipated from a harmless getaway ⎯ whenever the world’s volume seems to rise to a roar, or if ever I feel the need to escape the racket in my mind, I close my eyes and think of Sultanahmet in all its splendor, an endearing medley of cobblestone, reaching minarets, and stone facades.