The Impact of Environments

A Shift in Pace = A Shift In Perspective

The other day, my mind slipped back to a one-week video art residency I attended in Kentucky years ago. I remembered the simplicity of my life then, how my only task was to edit a documentary. Not only did I accomplish a surprising amount, but I possessed a certain peace in knowing my To Do list contained only one item. I realized that week was the only time in my entire life I can recall having only one thing to do (well, not including vacations, of course). How is it that in all my years of living, I have only one memory of singular focus?

I can attribute some of my fragmentation to my tendency to find more things worth exploring than I really have time for. But, that’s not the whole picture. The truth is, that time in Kentucky was also the only time my environment supported singular focus – and granted me time for it.

I was recently in Costa Rica where time ticks to a different kind of clock. The town I was in had only one bank that only took Visa. Of course, I had a Mastercard, so the locals informed me that the only way to get cash was to take a two hour bus ride on a dusty road into another town and return via the same route. This meant a 4-5 hour trip for money! My American mind couldn’t grasp this, and I kept putting my Mastercard in the local bank ATM, in some vain hope that it would show me special treatment. Of course, it didn’t, and in the end, I took the bus…which turned out to be a fantastic opportunity to see how people really lived in Costa Rica. The thing that struck me about this experience was that in the United States, not only would I have been distraught by the situation, but my environment would have had a problem with it as well. How many Americans could comfortably take 4-5 hours out of a work day to retrieve cash?

That experience has gotten me thinking about the impact of our environments on our lives. Multitasking is commonplace and expected in the United States. The technology boom certainly encourages it. Advocates might argue this pace makes us a more productive society – after all, we have to keep up. But…at what cost?

I love to travel because inevitably I am reminded that there are so many other ways to approach life. This last trip left me wondering about the impact of the frantic pace of American culture. I’m not convinced there is a genuinely good reason to demand so much from ourselves in the pursuit of more and more productivity. We are human beings, after all – not robots.