Have I got used to what is unnatural?
The question came out of my conversation with Kalpana Arias, a technologist and urban grower who asks what modern city life has normalised that is, in fact, deeply unnatural. I thought I knew my answer. I live in a flat in London, without a garden. I walk outside when I can, I enjoy the gardens around me, and I try to pay attention to what my body and spirit need.
Then I looked at what I have gathered around me to make up for it. A grounding mat, because I so rarely touch the earth. A red light lamp, for the sun I see too little of. Supplements, because I no longer trust my food to carry what my body needs to thrive. None of this is unusual. That is rather the point.
Even my clothes have started to trouble me. I recently came across the idea that fabrics carry an energy of their own, that linen holds the highest, and that priests in the ancient world wore it. I cannot tell you whether that is true. But I noticed how much I wanted it to be. So much of what fills our wardrobes is fast fashion: cheap, synthetic, essentially plastic. I do not feel that it gives me anything. Some days I suspect it takes something away.
Each of these things is a small correction. And each one stands in for something that was once simply part of life, and cost nothing: the ground under our feet, the sun on our skin, food grown in living soil, cloth made from living things.
Kalpana said something that I keep returning to. Our systems, she argued, are not broken. They are working exactly as they were designed. Our cities were built for movement, efficiency and consumption. And a world designed for consumption will, quite naturally, sell us back what it has taken away.
I do not say that to dismiss the things on my shelf. Some of them may well help me, and I genuinely do not know which. What unsettles me is not the products. It is how normal they feel.
There is another loss I find harder to name, because nobody sells a substitute for it.
Since COVID, I have watched people thin out of daily life. We go out less. We work from home more. We meet on screens, in scheduled slots, with an agenda and an end time. What I miss is not meetings. It is the conversation nobody planned: by the kettle, in a corridor, on the way out of a building. The one you did not know you needed until it happened.
For a while I treated these as two separate things, a loss of nature and a loss of people. Kalpana's story suggests they may be one. She began gardening on London's streets during the pandemic, when parks and community gardens closed their gates. A patch of soil in a public place is, by its nature, also a place where people meet.
Perhaps that is not a coincidence. We are nature ourselves, Kalpana reminded me, not visitors to it. It would make sense if our need for the living world and our need for each other came from the same place, and faded in the same way, once we stopped going outside.
So is this the new normal?
It may be. Normal is simply what we stop noticing. I suspect I have adapted to concrete more than I care to admit. The absence of green no longer registers; it has become the background of a working day.
But what is designed can be redesigned. That is true of a city. It is also true of a morning, a walk, a habit.
I will keep the grounding mat. But I want to stop treating it as the answer, and let it become a reminder of what it stands in for: the walk I did not take, the park I passed without entering, the gardens around our community that I pass most days without really stopping to look.
I do not have a garden of my own. The gardens surrounding our community are beautifully kept by professionals, so I never have to touch anything; I simply admire them. Even there, I notice, I am a spectator rather than a participant. So I have started to think of them as borrowed, and to borrow them more deliberately: to linger, and to notice what is changing with the season. And I suspect the way back to other people runs through the same door: going outside, without an agenda, and seeing who is there.
I began by asking what I have got used to. I will end with a different question, one I would put to anyone reading this at a desk in a city:
What have I stopped reaching for, simply because something easier was within reach?
My conversation with Kalpana Arias, The City, the Soul and the Self, is episode two of The Edge of Meaning Podcast.