The New Inquiry - Place Matters
An essay by Jennifer Acker, founder and editor of The Common about sense of place, one of our key concepts in Managing with Aloha.
As is apparent with my recent posting (with photos shared from my recent trip to Portland), my experiences with sightseeing is very different from this, what Acker summarizes as a “blurry, distanced, vaguely self-loathing experience.”
In his keen and delightful book on the search for authenticity in modern life, The Thing Itself, Richard Todd discusses tourism’s impoverishment of the individual, which I think also holds true of traveling the web. The activity of sightseeing can wear one down because of the distance created between the observer and the observed. As much as we seek “unimplication” in the world we are touring, he says, the experience leaves us feeling empty and anonymous, part of a “declassed, identity-blurred worldwide mob.” We seek novelty but are dissatisfied by the limited way the new experiences impact us. He writes, “Though we wear our travels, when they are over, like badges, while we are actually traveling we suffer constant little erosions of self-regard everywhere we go.”
What we do agree on however, is that sense of place is important to us: When we do have a connection to place, we want to preserve it, and better understand and honor its influence on us.
There is much more in this article, and I encourage you to read it fully. A visit to her own site, The Common would also be well worth your reading time.
