Wayfinding + place-making
~ time, distance, and urge
Musings … my thoughts, every day since March 20, 2003 …
Some mornings begin with reflection.
Others begin with a less negotiable summons from the body, one that no amount of denial or indignity can bargain down.
Before thought, before headline, before any unfinished yesterday business of yesterday can reclaim space in our heads - there is one crude, comic comfort:
I woke up, again.
Some mornings begin without time for thinking; mine often begin with a quick calculation of my physical needs conflated with my distance from plumbing.
Before I’ve formed a single noble thought, before I’ve checked light, temperature, or whether the world still deserves my attention, my body issued a directive with all the warmth and flexibility of a municipal order:
move.
And move now.
There is something darkly reassuring in this. I woke up. I’m still here. My lease on life, however provisional it felt at bedtime, has been renewed overnight without legal fees, commission, construction or renovation - no hostile review of design deficiencies.
Do you ever lie there for half a second, taking inventory?
Heat or cold. Light or dark. Ache or ease. Alone, or not.
Living, apparently.
Good. Now, where’s that damned bathroom?
That, I suspect, is where place-making really begins, not in grand design, curated finishes, or tasteful objects arranged to suggest virtue, taste or great design.
Home begins with function and wayfinding. With proximity. With the quiet genius of not having to cross a football field of hallway while half-conscious and bargaining with biology.
Civilized society should be judged, at least in part, by whether the toilet is close to the bed and the coffee not absurdly far from either.
The comic insult, of course, is that waking up also means yesterday survived and travelled with us.
Unfinished work. Unresolved problems/thoughts. And dreams that didn’t make payroll. They all came with me across/through/surviving the night shift.
Still, the first news is good news.
Renewal, again, however briefly, however conditionally, and for one more day at a time, these demised premises known as our person/body, constructed of skin and bone and water, remain ours to occupy.
Every morning is a ridiculous little miracle:
equal parts bladder, burden, and nothing graceful about it.