Have you ever noticed there are places in our lives that have a kind of gravity to them? In some cases this becomes so powerful that it borders on inescapable. What is it about these locations that gather up so much force that they can hold us in place? Just about everything in our lives are tied to a specific place. The people we know are associated with certain locations. Our memories are linked to where they happened so much that we can return years later and have them feel fresh again. It makes me wonder if the location is more important than the events that surround them. Granted the people and things in a specific place are important, but it's really where they happen that give it weight. It's that weight that grows over time in such a way that gives power to a certain location.
Usually our first experience with a special place is home. As children we may not realize how important it is until we have to leave it for that other place where we end up spending most of our childhood, school. It's at that point when we may start to see the world divided up into distinct locations, each with its own people and associations. We spend a lot of our early lives at school or at least doing things related to school. In some ways that's where we ourselves start our own division between who we are at home and who we become for the outside world. Sometimes it's a subtle change that we don't even realize is happening until our two worlds collide. While we may not become entirely different people, it's when we find ourselves in between that we see that the place can dictate who we are. Maybe in that way we take certain places with us no matter where we are.
We know a lot of people throughout our lives. Most of those people have come and gone. Some of them stay with us throughout our lives, even if we're not physically close to them the whole time. It's rare that we stay in a single place our entire lives and even the slightest relocation means a change in distance from someone in our life. So the place that we leave becomes something of a housing for a certain moment in our existence. The people, the memories, and the time spent all get rolled into this collection that's associated with one place. What's interesting is that a place doesn't always have to be a physical location. It can also be a point in our lives. Since time is always moving forward it's often something we can't return to. Some may try to hold onto it or keep looking for a way back to it, but it's usually just another place we used to be. For many of us that place exists only in our minds, endlessly shaped by our thoughts of what was or what could have been. If a place only exists in our minds is it real? If it's only in our mind maybe that's the most real it can ever be for us, regardless of what reality tries to show us.
