Find the place you love
It’s grey and drizzling here in London. I find myself daydreaming about pine trees covered in snow, ice crunching underfoot, long walks underneath the orange glow of streetlights on a cold and dark evening. I see the pictures friends in Finland are posting on social media. Record snowfall. Huge drifts everywhere. Smiles after skiing a couple of laps around soft looking tracks in the woods. It hits me in the gut. I even feel like skiing.
A while ago I read a column in the Atlantic. It talked about topophilia, that warm feeling you get from a place. It talked about how places you love stay in your body. The columnist Arthur C. Brooks writes:
In his book A Reenchanted World, the sociologist James William Gibson defines topophilia as a spiritual connection, especially with nature. Oladele Ogunseitan, a microbiologist at the University of California at Irvine, demonstrates topophilia by showing that people are attracted to both objective and subjective—even unconscious—criteria. My friend’s affinity for the “Seattle rain” is probably fueled by what Ogunseitan calls “synesthetic tendency,” or the way particular, ordinary sensory perceptions affect our memory and emotions. If the smell of a fresh-cooked pie, the sound of a train whistle at night, or the feeling of a crisp autumn wind evokes a visceral memory of a particular place, you are experiencing a synesthetic tendency.
As I’m writing this I can almost taste the snow, that cold, metallic tang. I can feel my nostrils sticking together as I breathe in the cold air. I can see frost forming on the tips of my hair. I miss winter, proper winter.
– Quote from Find the place you love. Then move there. in the Atlantic.