Sign says, “keep out!”
March 29th, 2009
Urban Confinement II, by Anja Percival
There’s an ache within us — a sense that something essentially human is slipping from our grasp. We live surrounded by concrete, steel, plastic, and bright unnatural light. Closed in spaces – whether office cubicles, bedrooms, elevators, our automobiles – are the rule rather than our cozy exception. Daily, we navigate walkways, gates and fences, crosswalks, locked doors, marked and unmarked property lines. “No trespassing” signs can bring a contemplative beach stroll to a halt.
We might feel it most in big cities. No doubt that urban living brings excitement, innovation, and raises incomes and possibilities. At the same time, the bigger the city, the more crowded our spaces and the more rapid our pace. In fact, researchers have found that the more populated the city the faster its people walk. And to move it all along with order and efficiency, time and space has to be structured. Our lives have become governed by wristwatches, timed traffic lights, scheduling technologies, automatic door locks, and crosswalks.
We’ve learned to live, and even love, our walled-in ordered lives. The natural world is a wild encroachment, a threat if not bound, ordered, and managed. Ooooh, baby baby it’s a wild world. “Keep out!” the signs warn. “Stay within the lines.” And our ache whispers on.
Signs, by Five Man Electric Band
It shows itself in our chronic anxieties and depressions. At times, it’s a dull sensation of not being at home in our own skins. Our blessing and curse is that we’re highly adaptable creatures. We can learn better than any other creature how to make the most horrid environments home. In our modern age, we’ve learned to love the comfort and safety of staying inside.
If we’re lucky, once or twice a year we make our escape. Like hounds dashing through a slit in the screen door, we rush toward our two weeks in the mountains, or by the ocean, or that lakefront cabin. Hunters hunt. Rock climbers climb. Hikers hike. Campers camp. Sunners sun. Then, we rush back to back into the confines of that familiar ache.
Researchers have found that our senses are wired to find certain landscapes appealing. Our reward circuitry lights up at the sight of hillsides, meandering streams, paths bending around partially blocked views, verdant green foliage capped with color. To the senses of our evolutionary ancestors these landscapes may have signaled abundance and safety. Some have argued that our sense of natural beauty is the mechanism that drove our ancestors into suitable habitats.
Pastoral Landscape, Asher Brown Durand, 1861
We are meant to move, not sit around for hours on end watching our tiny little backlit TV and computer screens while eating potato chips. Our visual system loves dashes of color and wide opened spaces with a touch of surrounding mystery. We are meant to engage our environment, not be confined by it. We are happiest expressing ourselves. Listening to the rustling of leaves and babbling of cool water streams. Using our hands. Running. Jumping. Meandering. Swimming. Climbing. Touching.
To ease that ache need we see past those barriers of concrete and steel? Need we every now and then throw out our well-ordered schedules for at least one day every week? It seems we come back into ourselves, if only for a moment, whenever we step off the marked path and into nature’s disordered and wild ways.
