I have been reading a lot during my sabbatical, and one theme has served as the through line of what I’ve consumed. Covid has exacerbated this theme, and the theme is that place matters. Where you are, what (and who) is around you is important. It contextualizes everything. I’m not totally sure of the reasons the folks I’ve been reading — Eugene Peterson, Andrew Peterson and Ryan Holiday — believe this, but it is very apparent in the way they live their lives, and it’s something that I’ve been considering more deeply as the fog of the pandemic begins to dissipate.
I’m not sure any of us will ever view place the same way we used to. The belief that, if we really wanted to, we could live our entire lives online, digitally, has been extinguished. Place matters because presence matters and because we have been confronted with the reality that the opposite of being present in a specific place is not something we ever want to experience — whether in theory or in reality — for an extended period of time ever again. While we have become more reliant on our digital world over the last year, we have simultaneously become less enamored with it and less compelled by what it promises. This is a good thing, even if it will be difficult to reconcile at first.