"Maybe I am skipping over the city and going from very personal things to the world, from internal experience to giant, far-away-from-space experience"

Regina Spektor’s words evoke the fluidity and scope of human perception and creativity. She draws attention to the way our minds can leap from the minutiae of personal, intimate experiences to the vastness of universal, even cosmic, perspectives. There is an inherent elasticity in consciousness: within a single thought or creative act, we can move rapidly from the texture of our own emotions or memories, the “very personal things”, to a perspective that encompasses entire cities or, even more expansively, the “giant, far-away-from-space experience.”

By stating she might be “skipping over the city,” Spektor hints at a pattern of thinking or creating that bypasses the purely social or communal level, leaping instead from the deeply internal to the nearly infinite. Cities typically represent the collective realm, the social fabric, the complexities of shared life. Yet, sometimes, the leap of imagination or self-examination bypasses those layers. For artists and thinkers, this oscillation between interior and universal may feel natural, even necessary. The “internal experience” is the wellspring of subjectivity, private feelings, dreams, the roots of creativity. But these roots can instantly transport someone “far away,” connecting microcosm and macrocosm.

Spektor’s phrase also captures a certain sense of wonder and the unique way that creation or contemplation can make distances collapse. The mundane details of everyday life can, in a flash, be exchanged for the incomprehensible scale of galaxies, the sweep of existence itself. Her words imply a refusal to be bound by ordinary transitions. Instead, she celebrates the freedom to connect the smallest and largest realms, to honor both the idiosyncratic individual and the awe-inspiring enormity of the cosmos.

This dynamic, jumping from the inner life to the far outer world, acknowledges that both realms are not only valid, but intimately connected. Through imagination, memory, and feeling, the boundaries blur, and the creative mind can traverse limitless distances in an instant.