Natsuki Watanabe
It is 11pm on a Monday in Fairfax and I breathe a sigh of relief and exhaustion from completing all my homework. It is the second week of school and I am reminded of the long nights from last semester as I adjust back into school mode. Now that I am done with my tasks for today, I open YouTube and click on a new video from my current favorite YouTuber. I pause it to prep my late dinner and resume once I start eating. There are a few moments where I jump ahead of myself and think of other things, like whether I’m forgetting any assignments or something on my to-do list. However, I remind myself that I should relax and not overthink at least when I’m eating. After the 20 minute video ends, I click on another video from a different YouTuber. The YouTuber talks about her wedding planning experience and brings up a hilarious story that gives me a huge laugh. Thanks to that scene, I think my tension loosened and I felt more relaxed. Although I could be browsing through YouTube for hours, I closed my computer so I get as much sleep as possible.
A few weeks before, when I was back in Hawaii for winter break, I would go for daily walks around my neighborhood with my mom in the evening or night. One day, we left around 7pm and the sky was just dark enough to create a silhouette of palm trees. The breeze from the wind was so refreshing and the crying of the crickets was present as usual. In the beginning, it smelt earthy, like soil, but as we approached near the beach, the fishy smell of the ocean became stronger. Then came the part of the neighborhood that always smells like some type of flower. During the walk, I was realizing how many discoveries I was making about my neighborhood that I wouldn’t have noticed from passing by in a car. One of my favorite types of discoveries was noticing the various plants by different houses. For example, I’ve come to learn that one house has an avocado tree and that there is an enormous tree in between two houses that is home to many birds (which I discovered from hearing the overwhelming chirping when we passed by one evening). This may sound cliché, but I do think that I was more actively using and aware of my five senses than usual when I would go for these walks in my neighborhood.
In The Age of Missing Information, Bill McKibben says, “we usually learn a new way of doing things at the expense of the old way.” He describes how the current generation is gaining new types of information from mediated environments such as TVs, computers, and phones, at the expense of losing “fundamental” information. Through my time spent outside in nature without the influence of technology, my physical body and mind were not only refreshed, but my five senses were also actively at play. And I think that these five senses are an important part of this fundamental information that McKibben talks about. I do not think either type of information should be inputted more than the other, but I think that McKibbens’s reading and these 2 hours of information imply that a balance between our time in mediated environments and natural environments is needed.