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A sense of where you aren’t

At some point on Saturday morning, I clicked though a few items on the recently implemented, slickly randomized, feed-fueled blogroll at the bottom of the Waveflux homepage. I noted that Mike Davidson, guy-in-charge of Newsvine, had a new post up at his blog, so I clicked on over. The post was about an open web developer position (not qualified, not even a little bit), but I was soon distracted from the entry by the view of Puget Sound that sits atop each page of his blog. The image is updated every couple of minutes and is accompanied by a brief description of the current weather. I sat and studied the image for a little while, then finally broke away to go mow the lawn in the back yard.

All during the lawn chore, I thought about Seattle.

I used to think about Seattle all the time, back in the day. An ideal city, or so it seemed to me. Literate, yet casual. Awesome signature bookstore. Temperate summers. Large and attractive body of water, mountains in the distance, lots of trees. Never mind that I was not and am not the kind of person who actually goes out of doors to enjoy firsthand bodies of water, mountains, or trees. It would be enough, I reasoned, just to know that they were there. This is the same kind of pride-through-proximity that makes New Yorkers proud of Central Park, Broadway, and MoMA even if they never actually go to those places.

Davidson seems to be the kind of person who actually does partake of Seattle’s pleasures; the city is number one on his list of things for which he is thankful:

If the rest of the world knew that we actually have more livable weather than Washington D.C., New York, Chicago, Arizona, Atlanta, and even most of Florida, everyone would live here. When it rains, it only mists, and when it’s sunny it’s one of the most beautiful places in the country. If you like to waterski, hike, bike, run, snowboard, climb, boat, golf, shop, parasail, or just about anything else outdoors, you owe it to yourself to visit the Puget Sound region. Come during the summer months and you’ll never leave.

Ach.

I did spend a week in Seattle several years ago, not during the summer months but in October. Considerably cooler and wet most days, but enjoyable. The following year, again around October, I spent a week in Portland, which seemed somehow more accessible. Great town. Compact, easily navigated, attractive in its own way. Like Seattle, Portland also has an awesome signature bookstore. And as with Seattle, I fell in love with Portland and thought about moving there. Never did pull the trigger either time, though; worries about employability tethered me to the spot.

Years passed before I gave my affections to another place where I wasn’t, and on those occasions it was always connected with some vacation spot or other. Chicago, a little. London - a lot. Paris, kinda. Charleston, the South Carolina edition. Even a place closer to home, the picturesque rural wine country surrounding Augusta, MO.

By now, older and slightly more self-aware, I realize that this longing for the place you’re not has much more to do with where you actually are - or, rather, what’s you’re actually doing there, right now. I note that those fantasies of other places are always kind of vague on the whole vocational thing. That is, living in London sounds great until you consider that you have to work in order to live there - or anywhere. Sticking with the London example for a moment: the income of me and M would hardly allow us to live anywhere inside the Green Line. No, we’d be one of the many toilers who commute into the city to live, and then right back out again at the end of the business day.

While I do strongly believe in a sense of place, I also believe that the place matters much less than we think it does. What we do wherever we happen to be seems a great equalizer between locales. If you transplant a crappy job to a beautiful place, you’re still spending eight or more hours doing something you dislike, and that colors everything else. Even your view of bodies of water, mountains, and trees. If, on the other hand, the world in general seems an intrusion on your rewarding and enriching time at work, you could live just about anywhere and be just fine with that.

And there’s avocation to be considered. Most folks don’t live for their jobs, but many of them find a different sustenance in what they do outside of the job, hobbies from which they derive satisfaction and meaning and expression of self. Those activities help create place, especially if they involve some interaction with the locale.

So if we consider place, we have to think about more than what we see - we have to think about who we are.

Well. I think I’ll spend time mulling that over. Right after I check the weather once more in the Puget Sound area.

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