Does Place Matter?

My friend Shailesh once told me that place doesn’t matter. If you have complete mastery over your mind, you can be happy anywhere.  In the country or in the city, in the mountains or by the sea, in the US or in Nepal. In a jail cell, even.

Another friend of mine had endless debates on this subject with her therapist and with many friends.  She suspected she could break her writer’s block and continue with her dissertation if she had different surroundings. Instead of her dark walk-up, she hoped to afford to rent a sunny house. Surely she could write again in such a place.

She asked me what I thought. Does place matter?

I had read a book called The Power of Place, but even before then I believed that yes, place matters.  There was a woman being interviewed on NPR the other day; she runs an inn at the foot of a glacier, I think. She talked about how people come from all over to feel the energy because where she lives is the heart chakra of the earth.  The journalist asked her if she believes in that stuff.  Believe in it? I feel it. I live here, she said.

Since moving from Waterloo to Windsor last summer, I’ve come to understand even better how much place matters to me.  I was happy in Little Rock, Arkansas but certainly happier in some neighbourhoods than in others.  Can there be any doubt that my stay last October at my mum’s cottage on Harris Brake was healing because of the environment?

In Waterloo, I was more blessed than I realized. Because of where I lived, it became easy for me to live more in accordance with my beliefs.  Eating locally grown organic food was easy because Eating Well Organically was blocks from my house. I could bike to work. Everything that gives me joy, in fact, was at my doorstep: community, cafe culture, indie films, winos who like to hug, indie book stores, festivals in summer. Quantum physicists came from all over the world to work and lecture at an institute I rode past weekly on my bike.  For $25 I got to hear one of the world’s best perform Bach’s Six Suites for Unaccompanied Cello. I needed six tissues that night.

I didn’t realize until I started trying to settle in here how much difference place could make.

Sylvain and I have looked at a few apartments and condos near his house. Even though I am yearning to have a place of my own again, my heart was only half in the apartment hunting, though it wasn’t easy to pin down why.

This biggest struggle for me has been this: I think I know what kind of flower I am and what type of soil I need to blossom. But when I have thoughts like, “I could never be happy HERE,” I feel a pang of shame. Boy, what a snob I must be.  Or… if only I mastered mindfulness, I could be happy anywhere.

Thursday night–maybe ovulation time was throwing my hormones into a frenzy–I had a little meltdown. I’ve survived almost a year with no therapist, no pharmaceuticals and no social network. No church, even. The pressure was building inside me like steam inside a kettle.

My past is punctuated with radical departures.  First I set myself up in a situation that is going to become unbearable in time. Then when it becomes unbearable, I take off.  I have great adventures…like living in Japan a year, hitching Europe, moving to Canada!

I don’t want Sylvain to be the latest victim of my mental breakdown followed by radical departure. But there I was unable to sleep, my mind POSSESSED with fantasies of packing up the VW and hitting the road.

Then last night we drove way the hell over to Olde Sandwich Towne for folk music night. I hadn’t even slid down from the passenger seat of the van before I felt it. The neighbourhood made me happy. The ancient cemetery with stones from the 1800’s, the weather-worn epitaphs covered in lichen, the murals, the old courthouse and gaol all made me happy. It was like, “ooohh, there’s SOUL here.”

I could live in THOSE apartments, I offered. I’d be RIGHT ACROSS THE STREET from the LIBRARY! I’d be RIGHT ACROSS from YOGA classes and BELLY DANCING. I’d be right across from the FEMINIST THEATRE.

You could do those things now, Sylvain said.

Yeah, but I wouldn’t even have to get in my car to do them if I lived here.

It’s so FAR, he moaned. He wants me within walking distance of his house.  I want to be somewhere where my joy can find me again.

It’s not as far as Waterloo, I said.

And on went the tender tug of war between two people with different goals in mind.

Inside MacKenzie Hall, we staked out a table on the far right and were joined by two women older than I am but younger than my mom. We started chatting a bit and that right there made my heart leap up.  I especially liked the one nearest Sylvain; she reminded me of Carol Channing with her sweet, soft voice and habit of finishing every sentence with a trailing, “yeah” as if her own thought were falling on her from the sky like a feather and she was giving it her approval.

When Sylvain went to the washroom, she said to me, “I like it when people are friendly!”

When he came back, my voice lost in the noise of the room, I softly told him what she’d said. He responded in kind, sharing with me that when I’d gotten up to buy water, she had told him, “she’s so gentle. I like gentle people.”

Today I rode my bike to Art in the Park, which is hosted every year in another old neighbourhood, Walkerville. Again, I felt at home surrounded by ivy-covered stone and brick houses taller than they are wide, streets shaded by 100-year-old trees.

I pondered it. Why do I feel more relaxed and more happy here than in Riverside where all the buildings and houses are post-war? How can it matter so much? Does it matter only in my mind? Am I just a snob?

I’ve been trying to pinpoint what these places that nourish me have in common and part of it must be this. I have more spontaneous, genuine encounters and exchanges with other humans in these neighbourhoods.

I’m not saying folks over here on the east side aren’t friendly. Quite the contrary: when Sylvain and I take our evening strolls along the Ganatchio Trail, people say hi and even let us pet their dogs sometimes. But it’s not the same. What keeps me sane is some outside the box, crazy spontaneity. Like the hugs I used to get from Anatole or being able to blow bubbles as I walk down the street with flowers in my hair and NOT feel out of place.  Feel in place. Feel at home.

The hardest hardest hardest part of all of this is trying to explain it to Sylvain or justify it to myself. It’s an energy thing. I don’t know what else to say. Once upon a time I would have said, “I know what I know” and stuck to my guns. But since starting mindfulness practice, I don’t know anything I used to know.

What do you know?