Filtered for Your Environment as Treatment

First thing I did this morning after I got dressed was grab a screwdriver and tighten up the screws in the door handle to the common mail area of our building.

Yesterday, I had noticed that the handle was a bit loose. And it would only get more loose, faster, if it wasn’t fixed now. It’s a small thing, but one of my mantras recently has been “environment as treatment,” and fixing this was a part of fixing my environment so it would fix me. A collection of thoughts supporting this:

Strong design choices in common areas can help treat dementia symptoms and reduce the need for medication. It it literally part of the healing process. We are constantly communicating with the objects and spaces around us, and those spaces inform how we are able to communicate with each other.

An incredibly effective way to change yourself is to change something in your space. If you want to walk more, put something you regularly use in another room. These habits - the paths we wear down - shape our world and shape the habits of others that have to travel through our world.

And increasingly I feel we need to understand the environment as animate: A bay is a noun only if water is dead and treating the physical world as animate encourages us to shape and care for it. And, of course, buildings learn and adapt: fighting for a building to stand perfectly suited for its first purpose (and remain that way) is a fool’s errand. Building your own relationship with the world around you is the only way to ensure that both survive, and this is what I want to focus on when I fix things: repairing the relationship, not just the thing.