IDENTITY: WHERE ARE WE?

‘We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.’ (T.S. Eliot)

Habits of Mind: Applying past knowledge to new situations

When I was a child, I remember with delight writing down my long home address – 3 Parkway, Bognor Regis, West Sussex, England, United Kingdom, Europe, planet earth, the solar system, the universe! 

When it comes to a question of identity, where we live and have lived is another factor which shapes us. And some places leave a greater mark on our sense of self than others. This week I encountered a new word – Topophilia. This is the love of place with which we feel a particular attachment, and that may only become apparent when our bond with that place is threatened or we have to leave it. Kevin Durrheim in the ‘Journal of environmental psychology’ writes that leaving such a place ‘tends to provoke strong psychological and social responses, precisely because it entails a loss of self’.

It’s true that some places inspire greater love than others and are made so by the memories of things experienced there as well as the physical places themselves. And certainly Bognor Regis, a place that many would see as an unremarkable and old fashioned coastal town, is one such place for me. However, perhaps had I not left there and then returned with a new perspective, I would not have come to know and appreciate the place fully. For some people that shift of perspective has come from leaving the very planet earth itself.

On 16^th July 1969, astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins became some of the first people to look down at Earth from space. Aldrin called it a ‘Brilliant jewel in the black velvet sky.’ It gave him a whole new perspective on not only where we are but who we are.

Aldrin felt a state of mental clarity from the experience called the ‘overview effect’. It occurs when you are flung so far away from earth that you become totally overwhelmed and awed by the fragility and unity of life on our blue planet. ‘It’s the uncanny sense of understanding the ‘big picture’, and of feeling connected to and yet bigger than the intricate processes bubbling on earth’.

And one of the astronauts on the Apollo 8 mission is recorded as saying the following: “When we originally went to the moon, our total focus was on the moon. We weren’t thinking about looking back at the Earth. But now that we’ve done it, that may well have been the most important reason we went.”

NASA astronaut Ron Garan explains this incredible feeling in his book, ‘The Orbital Perspective’: ‘Seeing Earth from this vantage point gave me a unique perspective — something I’ve come to call the orbital perspective. Part of this is the realization that we are all traveling together on the planet and that if we all looked at the world from that perspective, we would see that nothing is impossible.’

Such a perspective may evoke topophilia for our planet as a whole. While there are specific places on this planet of ours for which we have a particular love and connection, the orbital perspective can remind us we are one people at home on planet earth. And it is our responsibility to be good stewards of that planet so it remains what Buzz Aldrin called a ‘Brilliant Jewel’.

Christine Crossley