Life Place

Somewhere in the swirl of life, each of us ponders three essential questions: “Who am I?” “Where am I?” and “What am I supposed to do?” We often consider the first question in isolation, as if it were the true key to our existence — as if the matter of who we are could be resolved independently of the two remaining questions...We wander the postmodern landscape like hunter-gatherers, searching for bits and pieces of meaning, unconsciously emulating the atomised consumers of economists’ elaborate models. Governments and transnational corporations expect us to substitute a shallow awareness of the entire globe for whatever deep wisdom and affection we might have had for a specific place.

In the process of becoming postmodern, we have abandoned the notion of “home,” and like innocent natives presented with beads and trinkets of shining lustre and unfamiliar purpose, we have surrendered our former homelands to the new gods of consumerism, transience, shallow information, global communication, and everexpanding technology. We are trained in schools and universities to “become” before we “locate.” The ends of these hopeless wanderings, in terms of both purpose and place, very often elude us. Our places and communities have been usurped by machines, sprawled out by the automobile, homogenised by consumer culture, seduced by the globalising economy, trivialised by TV, and disconnected from deep wisdom by the shallow superficiality of the “electronic superhighway.”