The word sounds like something heavy…like maybe the entire world!
We are, every one of us, bound by the physical geography in which we live. A different geography sets the stage for a different life. Yet, we are also affected by the geography of the rest of the world, too.
It has become a cliché to write that “everything is interconnected.” Today, science tells us that over the entire span of human life on earth, this has never been truer.
Did you enjoy geography in school? It might have been a teacher who made a difference. Nothing worse than a bored teacher who does not like the subject. And nothing is better than an enthusiastic teacher!
My first geography teacher was my sister. She was six years older, and earned her weekly allowance by reading to me at bedtime. She could not avoid the job, because we shared twin beds in a small room in those years. Every night, I would pester and plead for “…just one more chapter, just one more story please, please!”
“I have to do my homework,” she would answer.
“Oh, please?” I would whine. Sometimes I would even start to cry, being wretchedly manipulative.
“NO, sorry,” she countered as she put the story book away and picked up her big red geography book from the rumpled chenille bedspread where I liked to jump from my bed to hers.
One night I demanded, “What is so good about THAT book?” I grabbed it from her, and quickly, clumsily turned the pages – pages covered with words I could not read yet. Finally, I found some grainy black and white pictures. “What is that, who are they?” I asked. It was a photo of four fur-clad Inuit standing next to a sled, surrounded by ice and snow. In that old textbook they were called “Eskimos.” Fascinated, I asked her right then to read her homework to me.
We eventually traveled together cover to cover through that geography book, but I never forgot the strong ice bound people who lived at the frozen edge of the earth. They were my favorite story, and my first awareness of other humans living entirely different lives in such a different place. So, years later when I was all grown up with children of my own and read about the Inuit and polar bear habitats being threatened by climate change, I had to go and see about that for myself. Later, I will tell you some of those stories, too.
I wonder what geography-inspired stories you have tucked away in your memory? What grabs your interest?
Before signing off for today, I would like to share a book suggestion: Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps that Explain Everything About the World by Tim Marshall. It shows how the geography in which one lives shapes both life and national destiny. I found it fascinating!
VJ (Ginny) Michaux