It was only this morning as I stuffed the spawn-hauler with the children of the neighbourhood to deliver them to their daily dose of institutional life, that I found myself grumbling, as I do almost every day from December through March, about how much I hate winter. So now, in an idle and unfocused moment where I'm sure there's something I'm supposed to be doing, I've found myself leafing through old photographs on my computer. I stumbled upon this one:
I remember this day as if it were yesterday yet it was taken on December 19, 2008 during a long walk I took through a local park after a major snowstorm. This wasn't even a particularly auspicious day for me. I was on my way to see my doctor for some unpleasant lecturing. But I remember sitting on a bench, looking out on this vista, and finding it hard to imagine anything much prettier or more relaxing. At a conference I attended not long before this, on the subject of environment and community health, someone said that there was a study showing that if people are asked to draw a pleasant and restorative environment, they will never draw a winter scene. But I'm not sure that means we can't find pleasure and restoration in environments like the one shown above. In fact, based on my own experience, I know that we can.
So now I'm struggling to find some reasonable excuse for posting this picture. Maybe the lesson is just that we don't always think we like what is good for us. Or maybe it's that looking back on something is different to being right in the middle of it. Or maybe the idea of something is so different to the experience of something that we should just use our experiences as a guide rather than our ideas. And now in a peculiar kind of mental connection, I'm thinking of the most recent advice I got from the same doctor I was visiting that day, who said "Colin, I think that if you tried harder to be a normal person and not as hard to be intelligent and insightful about everything, you might be happier." [sidebar here is that anyone who knows me will understand how such advice is both perfect for me and hilariously impossible for me]. I think he might have been saying much the same kind of thing that I'm grappling with. Perhaps when we design we need to be less concerned with what we think and more concerned with how we feel. The body doesn't lie.
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