Do You Have The “Place Gene”?

Every minute of every day, every single person is immersed in what we typically call “place”.

We are always situated in a particular location — our home, our car, our workplace, the places we typically shop, our church or other place of worship — and most often these are the same locations from one day to the next. At least during non-COVID times, we’re constantly traveling from one place to another — from the bedroom to the kitchen, from the house to the garage, from home to work, from one store to another, from our front door to a nearby park or restaurant. As we travel, our physical environment is constantly changing. We are indoors, we are outdoors, or we are somewhere in between. We travel on foot, on a bus or train, in a car or truck. The world gets warmer or cooler, lighter or darker. We are surrounded by tall buildings or parking lots or open fields or some combination of all three.

In other words, “place” is one of the most common and ubiquitous of all human experiences. Yet most of us never think about it.

Instead, we just drift from place to place every day without consciously processing the experience. And the world of GPS has made us less sensitive to place. It used to be that in order to navigate the world, you had to orient yourself within it. Now all you do is follow the GPS — turn left, turn right, the destination is on your right. You don’t have to understand the places you are traveling through in order to successfully navigate through them.