Relationship with our Immediate Environment
Relationship with our Immediate Environment- A reflection
Today let’s honour our relationship with our immediate environment.
Let’s honour some places that supply our needs and provide us with security and comfort. Let’s honour:
- The place where we rest our bodies at night and keep the belongings we cherish and need.
- The place where we store and prepare our food.
- The places where we cleanse and release what our bodies no longer need.
- The furniture and spaces where we intake our nutrients in the company of those we love.
- The places where we unwind and relax alone or with others.
- The private and public spaces available to us.
- The places where we connect with nature.
- The streets that give us direction, organize our multi-modal movement, and provide for other essential infrastructure.
- The systems and infrastructures that enable us to travel to new places and explore life.
- The places where we gather and work for a common goal. The areas that give us a sense of purpose and camaraderie with others alike.
- The places that provide us with new and fantastic experiences that feed our senses and lifestyles.
- Places of gathering, communion, play, study, and so many more that hold our life together.
To some, the above may sound too romantic, and to an extent, it’s true.
Honouring our relationship with our immediate environment is not only an act of awareness and gratitude to all these places, systems, and infrastructures. It is also a practice of active conscious participation and creation. The best way to honour the places that allow us life is to take care of them and participate in their design.
We make our bed. We clean our rooms. We organize our clothes. We keep the kitchen, bathrooms, and tables clean. We adorn and decorate our dining, living room, and home rooms. We respect those we share our time with. We keep our shared spaces clean, so others can freely use them. We adopt nature. Take care of our streets, pedestrians, drivers, and transportation hubs. We respect those we work with and keep our workplaces as organized and positive as possible. We are kind and respect anyone who provides us with any service, especially those we prefer to ignore.
We take ownership and stewardship of all the places that provide for all the people that are part of them and us, and we actively participate in their creation. From an urban and place-making point of view, people, their presence, activity, and participation in space turn a set of materials and patterns in space into a place.
We currently have such sturdy systems in place – yes, all of them can/should improve. However, their current conditions provide us with ample convenience and security. Conditions and conveniences people before us could only imagine. Within that safety and comfort, sometimes we forget that the immediate environment we inhabit requires of us as much as we of it. It requires time, effort, planning, and consideration. Hence, the best way to begin improving them is by taking ownership of all our interactions in and with the places we inhabit.
The best part is that ownership and consideration are surprisingly contagious- like other types of behaviour.
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February 6, 2023