bucolic: rustic; pastoral.

Home is, where your heart is.

Living (far) off town is a thing you may call bucolic, at least in the sense of the word rustic. It is a well-known circumstance for me, as I have never lived in a town, even a small one. For the most part of my life (21 years to date) I expected to see mainly one color when looking out of my window: Green. Our house is surrounded by green meadows and fields and endless forests mark the horizon. To me, this is heaven on earth.

Why and when is living amid nature better than living amid a town or city?

Speed of Life

The difference in the subjective perception how fast time flows is tremendous between rural and urban areas. While in very rural areas, time seems to have stopped and flows in microscopic magnitude, the heart of every city has a fast pulse that drives along every entity. The sheer choice of occupations in urban centers is enough to over-drive people – the dominating mind-set in cities is hectic – time is scarce, use it! In rural areas, the options of occupation are not as diverse hence people demonstrate a dominating mind-set of softly flowing with the tide of time.

Most people are amid these extremes, still the location you inhabit influences the mind-set tendency.

Air Quality

People that have lived their whole life in cities notice the distinctly better quality of fresh air in bucolic areas. Farmers can’t help noticing the smell of the city upon getting there. There is a margin in air quality and while people can survive in both environments, living amid nature naturally is better for your body, mind and soul.

Infrastructure

Rural areas do not offer many spaces to go out, there are no special shops for unusual goods, the internet connections are slow and you have to drive quite a while to get from one point to another. This is a major drawback of every rural area – a flaw by design. Living on the countryside, I know oh too well that you are done without a car at your disposal.

Urban areas offer everything you could dream of (sometimes even more, sometimes they lack options) within a small spare of space. It is easy to navigate and commute from point to point without the necessity of a car or even a bike – going per pedes is just fine in many occasions.

Community

How people interact is entirely different on the countryside than it is in the cities. Cities grant you anonymity above all – amongst thousands or even millions you are no one – you have no identity. You can do whatever you want and chances that you will be recognized or memorized are low. This is awesome for those who do not want to be disturbed in their privacy by other people. In small villages, everyone knows everyone. You have an identity and are known for what you do and who you are. Privacy is compromised in this environment but chances are that you are helped out if you are in need.

Small villages form strong communities that emphasize on cooperation (ideally) and the ‘we’-consciousness is highly noticeable. Huge cities consist of scattered individuals that share few bonds with each other. Normally, small communities are formed amongst the inhabitation, but no great community can arise from this multitude of individual minds.

In most cases, it is privacy against community.

Ideal Places?

What you consider an ideal place to live your life is dependent on what you value most. Rural life can be very relaxing and comfortable, integrated into a welcoming community. It can be a great benefit to your health, with fresh air, forests to take walks and space to roam free in abundance. But it can also be a hindrance to individuality. Rural communities are known to have a strong tendency to make people conform to their informal rules. The anonymity of a city can be a great asset to let your individual needs and talents flourish, especially if you are in need of a large audience. Cities offer great infrastructure – if you like to go out a lot and meet a lot of different people, city life most probably is for you.

For a large number of people, suburban areas have proven to be the perfect mixture between the accessibility of urban infrastructure and the laid-back relaxedness of rural landscapes. You can count me in to these people – I live in a place that is not too far from city infrastructure but still retains the benefits of rural life – the landscape, the slow speed of life and the traditions that remain here while extinct in urban areas.

Consider what is important to you when choosing where to live. You have to cope with your decision for quite a while, normally

In order to challenge your thinking, you have to work with associations. Take a random word and think of everything you associate with. From there on, articulate what you think about these associations. Which feelings and memories arise from them?

This is the key element of this new section of my blog. After pondering quite a while over possible topics for articles, I will let myself be inspired by random words and the associations they spike.

To do this, I make use of the Dictionary.com “Word of the Day” RSS feed available here. Dictionary.com supplies the feed readers with new words every day – usually words that are outside of the lexicon of colloquial language. This leaves me with two advantages – I explore and widen my knowledge on a myriad of topics and memorize new and unusual words that may better my writing

So watch out for (near-)daily updates in this section. There occasionally will be breaks due to lack of internet access but normally, every day will bring a new splash of thoughts.

Comments are highly appreciated – as usual

In love for life
Simon