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.