As I write this, I am immersed in the clamor and noise of construction across the street, preparing to build yet another apartment block no one seems to want, but which invariably keep popping up all across the city. ‘Condo cancer’, as I’ve long called it, spreading without warning everywhere you look. It feels as though soon this city will have little else other than these towering structures blocking out the sky.
Crossing the street the other way brings me to a busy shopping plaza, with pedestrians darting between the cars which narrowly avoid hitting one another in the cramped parking lot. At the end of the plaza, I catch an often-packed bus to connect with an equally packed subway train.
Everywhere I turn there seems to be increased activity, people, traffic, construction and noise, all of which are becoming harder for me to bear, especially as I get older. I do seek out the panacea of nature regularly, but even then, I’m often met with noise from traffic, building or the ubiquitous leaf blowers. Large sections of two parks I go to have been under construction for months and remain inaccessible.
It feels like everywhere is getting filled up, taking away the space. We all need space to breathe – as much as we need air, because without it, we cannot achieve a sense of perspective on our place in the world and what truly matters.
One of the things I love about landscape painting is when an artist depicts figures in the foreground, dwarfed by towering mountains or the endless swell of the sea. Recognizing that we are tiny creatures in this universe, we can begin to feel our vulnerabilities and the precariousness of our existence.
In cities, we skew this perspective by filling up all the space, thereby inflating our own sense of prominence and place. And by filling up our outer space, we’re also cluttering up our inner space, so we literally have no room to grow or to reflect on where we’ve been and where we’re going next. Our phone addictions compound this, beaming out imaging and messages that permeate our souls. We need to put down our phones and look out in the distance, but we need to be able to see into the distance in the first place.
Space, like time, is another disappearing commodity for many people, as it is, most pressingly, for wildlife. Humans need homes but animals do too, and this planet belongs to them as much as it does to us. I wish with all my heart that we would stop building and start re-wilding, so we can truly experience the wonder of living on this earth and to be able to find some peace.
Amen to this! 🙂