The Pace of Summer - Humans and their Environment
Reading time: 4 min
Photo by Kadir Celep on Unsplash
“We are all products of our environment; every person we meet, every new experience or adventure, every book we read, touches and changes us, making us the unique being we are.”
Summer in Italy
It’s been years since the last time I spent more than a few days in Italy during the Summer.
I had forgotten how present, how real, how alive a season can be.
Summer, in Italy, is not a temporary change in the weather. It lasts long enough to force you to change your habits, waking time, activity, clothing, food, drinks, house and furniture, location and even your skin.
Summer is a beast, insatiable and never-sleeping, and needs to be fought with slowness and calmness, with a sense of wonder and adaptability.
Summer’s pace, regular like the heartbeat of a resting lion, shapes the behaviour of every Italian. It splits the day into 3 sections;
The fresh early morning and late night—if the beast feels merciful—get filled with activity. Watering plants, household chores, food shopping, strolling along the shore, and going to the restaurant are tasks relegated to one end of the daily spectrum. The central part of the day, the hot hours, on the other hand, are a sort of buffer; nothing more than a slice of waiting time.
Just like passengers before boarding a plane, Italians kill those hours snoozing, reading, or playing cards. This is the space between lives, the crevice left empty by the overspills of occupation.
I get to watch the pace washing over me, while I struggle to keep the UK pace, so immutable, so constant and mild, just like the country’s weather painting the year as a long continuum, rather than the 4 immensely different sections of Italy.
Photo by Guzmán Barquín on Unsplash
Losing against the Beast
So, I’m losing against the beast. I go fast, I work, I keep productive, while the Beast requires me to slow down, waiting for me out the window, scorning at my fan and air-con.
How is that possible?
Mankind has been amazingly good at shaping environments to best suit its intentions. Cities, dams, bridges, ports. There is nothing humans can’t do.
“There is nothing about what we do that is natural. If we prized the natural we would still be hunting Spitters in the wilderness, or falling prey to the jaws of ants, instead of mastering our world. We have made a virtue of the unnatural. ”
I too have reshaped my working environment to make it almost identical to my desk in the UK. Charged laptop, wireless mouse, cup of tea—iced, though. I’m not crazy—limited sunlight and conditioned air. Nothing fancy, and yet, nobody else around me is fighting against the Beast with my very replicable weapons.
Geography shapes us much more than what we want to admit
As Lewis Dartnell brilliantly explains in his book Origins, our planet has a lot to do not only with our evolution, but also with politics and technological advancement.
We are as utterly reliant on fire today as were our Paleolithic ancestors who huddled around a campfire; we've just hidden it behind the scenes of the modern world.
We think we can bend the rules of nature to our will, but what we end up doing instead is fighting the Beast with the wrong weapons.
Numerous studies (one of them has been published in the book The Blue Zones) have found the Italian island of Sardinia to host the longest-living population in the world. The secret? Eat local, have a garden, make friends and stay away from screens.
Easy, right? We’ll see.
Alla prossima.
Photo by Amy Humphries on Unsplash
