Shaped by my environment

I hate getting on the tube when it’s sunny. You see, as a Scot am I conditioned to make of most of the good weather. Never mind that it is April and we have, hopefully, a whole summer of this to come. Growing up in what is legended to be Scotland’s wettest town, I became used to wet play days and cracking open the sun cream when the thermometer creaked over 18 degrees. Summer lasted approximately three weeks between May and June; always during exams, never in school holidays.

Today I chose to get the bus home from work, taking me twice as long as normal to travel from Westminster to North London. As I sat on the top deck watching office workers sprawled haphazardly in Parliament Square, basking by the National Gallery and licking ice cream cones in Camden, I wondered why I had this impulse to make the most of the weather. Sure, my childhood environment dictated my behaviour to a certain extent but does my current one do the same? As I was still sat on the bus and not subterranean in a sweaty tube train, I reckoned it did and anyway as a geographer I ought to know how man and society are shaped by the environment.

It got me thinking. What kind of an environment do I surround myself with? How do my untidy bedroom and my nondescript office affect me day to day? More importantly, what spiritual environment do I choose to spend time in? Living in a community of like-minded but wonderfully different people can have its challenges but these are far outweighed by the benefits. The pleasure of sharing joys, disappointments and early morning prayer. The comfort of tea, movies and home cooked food. But most importantly the knowledge that I am living in an environment of love that will question me, at times rebuke me and coax me slowly, but surely, into a deeper relationship with God. This is the environment that I want to shape me.

Jen