Afternoon in the Place des Vosges with a Bourgogne Aligoté, chevre and basil tart, and raisin-berry pastries. There are children and old men dressed in suits, families playing the grass, and a young couple arguing over a game of chess.

Lounging in the gardens and parks and talking politics over a picnic on an unseasonably warm autumn day it’s easy to see how the city can be so beguiling. It comes down to the matter of the grass really, which as an accidental tourist is always, without fail, incredibly greener on the other side.

But Paris is a place like any, I try to tell myself, and if I were in Rome or Prague I’d be telling myself that same thing. It’s not so much the geography as it is the psychology, my mindset while abroad and the quixotic notions of what life might be like, if a plane ticket in hand, a ratty threadbare bag, and a journal full of preconceived notions under my arm, were the only necessities in taking the plunge of expatriation.

But somehow Paris is different.

We all experience the fear and the thrill of taking that chance. Some of us have different destinations in mind, and some merely desire a brief fling with foreign lands to flavor the brew of life with an exotic spice.

Taking the plunge, though, taking the chance, risking it all, is a life choice that is buried deep somewhere in all of our minds. The thought is terrifying and exhilarating all in one garbled mess of poor language and cultural faux pas.

As the famous old foreign correspondent saying goes, “it’s time to leave a place when you can’t see the palm trees,” and for me, I’ve not noticed the trees at home in years, much less ones of a particular variety. Yet Paris in autumn is covered with leaves, of every species and every possibility. With a little wind, and a little rain, the paths are covered over, and map in hand, all I must do is pick a direction.

Why, someone might ask, is Paris more important than any other city? Well, because Paris takes itself more seriously than other cities. Parisians live the dream that the essence of what we all believe life, the world, and our place in it can be should be reflected in the buildings and on the streets where we spend our lives. A city should be alive as the people who call it home. Paris helps us to remember that we are compelled to pursue beautiful lives by something deeper, some calling that needs us as much as we need it.

In this beautiful place our possibility is only a measure of how deep we might dream if given a lifetime within in its walls.

Now, everyone writes about Paris. Everyone fancies the city enough to imagine living there, and there is plenty of literature out there recounting the lives of people who’ve done so. What’s not missing in all that is the result, what’s absent is the reason.

Anyone can put pen to paper and tell you how wonderful living in Paris is, what they rarely tell you of are the decisions and sacrifices they made, and the chances they took to reach that point.