There's an R.E.M. song (called "Stand") that goes, "Stand in the place where you live (Now face north) / Think about direction, wonder why you haven't before / Now stand in the place where you work (Now face west) / Think about the place where you live, wonder why you haven't before..."
Place is a funny thing. Today I left my home in Pittsburgh and traveled to Washington, D.C. It was a beautiful sunny day, and as I drove through the scenic, pastoral hills of middle Pennsylvania and Maryland, the colors of the blue sky and fluffy white clouds, the green and yellow grasses and the brown and red rocks seemed especially vibrant. I had the urge to pull over in a random spot in the country, just park on the side of the road and walk into one of those no-place fields and perhaps sit down or stand and look around and just say, "I am here. Where am I? I don't know the name of it, and it probably doesn't even have a name, but it doesn't matter. I'm just here." I've had this urge many times before when driving through the country. Why does no one utilize the vast resources of space we have in this country?
But another thing about place. I realized while sitting and eating dinner with my aunt and uncle (I'm living in a little apartment attached to their house in D.C.) how much the cumulative "you" is shaped by the places you have been, especially the place where you grew up, and also how much the current "you" is shaped by the place where you are at that moment. By "place," I am including the people around with whom you are interacting—everything that makes up your environment. Anyway, I know this is no incredible insight, but it just struck me strongly the extent to which place dominates our lives. For instance, you don't really realize how deeply you are affected by the house in which you grew up and your particular family culture until you go and live in a different house with a different family and notice all the seemingly trivial but actually tremendous variations. Solely by virtue of being in this place, instead of a place fifteen feet away in the next house over, you have (and are having) profoundly different experiences, and the way you react to those experiences is deemed to be "you." You would have been another you if you had grown up fifteen feet away.
Place is a funny thing. Today I left my home in Pittsburgh and traveled to Washington, D.C. It was a beautiful sunny day, and as I drove through the scenic, pastoral hills of middle Pennsylvania and Maryland, the colors of the blue sky and fluffy white clouds, the green and yellow grasses and the brown and red rocks seemed especially vibrant. I had the urge to pull over in a random spot in the country, just park on the side of the road and walk into one of those no-place fields and perhaps sit down or stand and look around and just say, "I am here. Where am I? I don't know the name of it, and it probably doesn't even have a name, but it doesn't matter. I'm just here." I've had this urge many times before when driving through the country. Why does no one utilize the vast resources of space we have in this country?
But another thing about place. I realized while sitting and eating dinner with my aunt and uncle (I'm living in a little apartment attached to their house in D.C.) how much the cumulative "you" is shaped by the places you have been, especially the place where you grew up, and also how much the current "you" is shaped by the place where you are at that moment. By "place," I am including the people around with whom you are interacting—everything that makes up your environment. Anyway, I know this is no incredible insight, but it just struck me strongly the extent to which place dominates our lives. For instance, you don't really realize how deeply you are affected by the house in which you grew up and your particular family culture until you go and live in a different house with a different family and notice all the seemingly trivial but actually tremendous variations. Solely by virtue of being in this place, instead of a place fifteen feet away in the next house over, you have (and are having) profoundly different experiences, and the way you react to those experiences is deemed to be "you." You would have been another you if you had grown up fifteen feet away.
"It's not really the place that matters," you might be thinking, "it's the people." I would agree that the people are more important. It doesn't really matter what house you're in if the people in it are the same; the house is just a container. But, place determines which people you are near, and physical proximity to people exercises a mysterious force, even with our modern communications technology. There is a Ted Leo and the Pharmacists album title that sums this phenomenon up well: "The Tyranny of Distance." Simply by relocating from this house to that house, you can undergo a 180 degree change of environment. You're in another place of mind. This is different from a state of mind. Being in a certain place does not determine your state of mind, but it does condition your possible states of mind. For example, you can leave one place where your thinking is often sludgy, repetitive, or blocked, and enter another place where, just by virtue of being in another place, it seems, your thinking becomes clear, light, direct, and agile. You can feel like you're escaping something or someone's influence by leaving a place, as if that something or someone threw off an invisible force field that weakens with distance; conversely, you can feel like you are entering into something or someone's influence, into a certain place's aura. These are just a couple examples of the myriad ways that a change of place can affect your mind. So I guess my big point is, place matters.
RSS Feed