Think of a place - a city, a village, a suburb - that's crawled under your skin and stayed put. No, not the otherworldly villa in Italy where you honeymooned or the timeshare where you flee to escape the worst week of winter. I'm not talking about the flings - I'm talking about the epic loves. Maybe it's the town where you grew up, or the big city where you came of age in your first years of real independence. These are the places you can leave, but only with the full awareness that they'll never really leave you.
And with good reason. These important places do more than just get under your skin. They burrow into your very identity. In his book "Mapping the Invisible Landscape," Kent Ryden draws attention to a truth so familiar it's easy to overlook: like the important people in our lives, places form us.
"Extended residence in a place tends to make us feel toward it almost as toward a living thing, for better or worse: through propinquity we have come to learn all about it and to love it or hate it for its nurturing comforts or alienating discomforts. The place has become a shaping partner in our lives, we partially define ourselves in its terms, and it carries the emotional charge of a family member or any other influential human agent."
Sometimes, especially when I'm in a big city, I look up and picture the place as a throbbing and alive, messy and precise limbic system. (The limbic system is the set of brain structures mammals use to pseudo-psychically tune into another's internal state; with the help of the limbic system, we pick up on other people's heart and breathing rates, hormone levels, immune functioning, blood pH, etc., and use their information to regulate our own internal workings. It's literally happening all the time.) When I'm in one of those few places that's got its hooks in me, I imagine that the city and I are partaking in the same type of give-and-take regulatory dance that one human (usually unwittingly) engages in with another. As a result, my thought processes, my sleep patterns, my heart rate, even my personality and identity bear the mark of that place.
Perhaps this limbic system/city comparison over-personifies the concept of place, but perhaps not: In his book "Place, Modernity and the Consumer's World," Robert David Sack explains that places have the potential to be such influential and molding companions because, just like the organisms we are, they weave together nature, cognition and social aspects.
Our important places are like faceless characters who are always around, but who we all too often forget to acknowledge. And if we fail to notice these ever-present characters, what are we failing to notice about ourselves?
