The Banana Peel Project

What does it mean to live in a space?  And what do we do once we have recognized that the choices we make are not, after all, entirely our own?  Are we left floating in a haze of it-doesn’t-matter?  Are we left to choose between boundless freedom and the imprisonment of law?  The choice between freedom and law is a false one.  At the core of both is a vision of pure necessity, of a need to remember, recover, or return to a truth hidden somewhere deep in our bodies.

“Habit” and “inhabit” have more than a passing affinity.  To remember that we live in a space is to remember that certain habits are encouraged and others are not.  Driving an automobile, we might say that we are “encouraged” to drive on a certain side of the road. We might even say that we are “in the habit” of driving on one side or the other.  But it is hard to imagine that one who was not in the habit of driving on the appropriate side of the road would be at it for very long.  When we live in a space, a space that we design in cooperation with others, there is a fine line between habit and compulsion, its evil twin.

An unfolding entanglement of reasons, immense and cloudlike in its scope and organization, is suddenly and without trepidation quietly brought together in a single point.  It dissolves into fragments whatever it touches, slicing things into bits and allowing them to fall gently into neatly arranged stacks.  This-is, this-is-not, this-could-be, this-will-be.  The groping feeling is gone, and it is no longer necessary to wonder if a thought will attach to its object or simply fall away.  Thoughts are sticky now, and what was once a hesitant touch is now (though only for a short time) a confident incision.  Things just get done; it just works.

There is a compatibility with boxes, inscriptions, categories, lines, points, things, and surfaces that was not there before.  It has the feeling of what-should-be.  It has the feeling of something I should have already been doing.  It has the feeling of being restored to a state that I was never in to begin with.  It has the feeling of being elegantly and invisibly persuaded that all is as it should be.  It has the feeling of truth.

Perhaps there are other options, other ways of negotiating this line between what-must-be-done and what-it-is-possible-to-do.  No solution is a solution for very long, and no problem is ever really fully solved.  We need to be strategic in our choices, and get comfortable moving between habits and opportunities.  Even though thought may, for a time, “just work,” it will not do so forever.