The power of your environment — from personal experience. The result of under 30 minutes of intuitive & free flow writing.
Setting, lighting, space, sound and design. These are a few of the elements that define your surroundings, the environment of you. I hear people say “Space is very important in a relationship” rather often, and I agree — only my experience leads me to add that it is important in the relationship between you and the whats of your doing, the occupation of your consciousness — or lack of (sleep) — and the way that things happen.
Let’s start off by thinking that we are currently in a field of wildflowers, there’s mountains in the distance, marking where our horizon ends. We can hear the flow of water, perhaps a river, perhaps the sea.
I used to live on a hill like this once — so this setting is very easy for me to imagine based off of real life experience. But I am confident this feeling of being in that environment is existent somehow somewhere in the minds of almost everyone. Peace, calm, contentment. Why do we associate this setting with those feelings, even if we have never been in such a place?
Obviously, we have been fed this trope in movies, books, art, speeches — we make tattoos out of it and we try to replicate the feeling and pay large sums of money to vacation in Switzerland thinking we can achieve that state of mind by being in that place.
It is the other way around. We have been conditioned into believing peace is where the setting is peaceful.
The difference between meditation and travel is that travel is the movement of your body and meditation is the movement of your mind.
Now, I am rather conflicted myself — is that mountainous sky and flowery field a figment of my imagination, a false sense of peace and contentment? Absolutely not.
I will present two perspectives here — one to help you perform better by selecting the right setting when provided with a choice, and two to help you realize that the setting need not be outside, it can be within.
Let me talk from experience — as I am writing this, I am sat cross legged on the drawing room carpet of my grandparents’ home, surrounded by the dim white light of their show chandelier and resting my back against a huge leather sofa that if I sit on for too long I fear for my spine. It is about 22:30 on a windy March night in Gurgaon, which I refuse to call Guru*ram. I feel peace. I feel productive and I feel like writing everything I have ever thought and write as I think and to write to think. I believe I am doing a little of each at the moment. This is the power of my grandparents’ home — it is a place I have loved since my childhood. For the past year, being isolated from my life pre pandemic and thus the company of my grandparents, and the comfort of their home, I have craved their presence and this feeling of comfort.
A warm blanket on my soul, if I may.
So yes, this space has affected me. Deeply.
Now, let me think back to when I was not here. In the drawing room of my parent’s home where I spent all of the pandemic until last week, crying into my hands while everyone was asleep. The same setting — a drawing room, late at night, a large sofa and a me. But she was different.
She was sad and in pain and unable to escape the sadness of the period she spent in that space. Yes, she had been productive in that house, successful, happy too — but mostly, she associated it with her sadness.
I apologize for switching to second person — I understand it can get confusing. However, it is a trait I appreciate in myself — this is how I talk, and as it turns out, write.
It was that same sad home, where I secured my first, second and third internship, scored my highest semester GPA in three years, improved my relationship with my body and brother, shared many a good dinner table talks with my father and family and played for hours on end with our dog. So how then, is this a sad home?
As it so happens, because the pain was so overwhelming at a point, and I was so painfully conscious of it, that I could not for the life of me, escape it. Until the change of setting became a near reality and I simply stopped crying. I started finding posts on Instagram funny enough to make me laugh out loud — something I had never done before. I am so happy right now. Truly.
That is the power of a change of space. To change a person within hours, to help them just by the thought, the hope, of a change of space.
Treat everything in life as space. The people you surround yourselves with, the things you do, the way you are with others, especially — because you are also space.
I will shift, now, to allowing yourself to act in the lack of your ideal space. This is difficult. This is really difficult, and I do not have any tips. You must ride out the waves and believe that you will move, you will travel and transcend and you must be driven to bring about that change.
Change is a constant.
Space does not have to be.
❤
I am excited to read this post publishing and correct errors on my part, which I shall use the comments section for. Please feel free to join me. I loved this exercise, I wanted to write, I started to, and now I’m here. Oh well.
