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Right. So I'm just going to babble about it for ... 1788 words ... and you can all take a nap, okay?
Geography is perhaps the one subject I feel truly passionate about, as something to study and as a way to view the world. It always has been. I can still remember going into first class (I would have been about 6?), and hearing we were going to study this thing for the first time, and I couldn't even spell it, and for some reason that only made it more exciting. I'm going to learn about something so big and cool and mysterious it needs a name I can't spell! That was six year old, innocent me, thinking about this thing I hadn't the first clue about, and already it sounded cool.
And then I actually started learning about it. And there were a few rough years, I'll grant you that. When you're doing the basics of any subject, sometimes it does get a bit boring, yes? But I loved the sense of space, the sense of fixing things into spaces, onto maps, that even primary school geography gave me. I think that's where I started getting obsessed with maps and time, where the need to constantly know where I was came from, and how where I was related to where I was going and where I came from. It was out of geography that I first got the sense that life was organisable, that there were ways to look at it, to see how if flowed, that would make it make sense. You could look at things, put them into a context of time and space, and understand them.
Of course, these were not actual thoughts back then. I was six. You don't think about that kind of thing when you're six, not consciously. Back then, geography was just something I enjoyed on an instinctive level, because it was real and tangible in a way that no other subject was back then. I don't know if anyone's noticed, but the way subjects are taught in schools is very ... floaty? They don't connect to each other, to real life. They're almost abstract. To this day, I blame that for why Mathematics and I have never gotten on. If it had been tied to something, related to something, made real ... well, too late now.
Then came secondary school, and the big mad pressure cooker of the Leaving Cert, and the way you understood the world became the secondary, if not last priority of the way things were taught. "You have to learn all these facts and figures if you want to pass and be able to get a job and survive in the real world! I don't care if any of them mean anything to you, you just have to know they exist! Here, learn this off by heart. Here, learn this method and be able to apply it to whatever example they give you. What do you mean, why? So you can pass the Leaving, that's why!"
So for those years, any enjoyment you got out of any subject was pretty much a happy and very accidental bonus. I still enjoyed geography, and passed it well with almost no effort, which was lucky considering how much energy I needed for other subjects, so it got very neglected. But it was still the easiest, the most effortless, because it fit the way my mind worked. I almost never had to learn things off by heart. I could just fit the new info into the model in my head of the way processes worked, and it would come out with the answer. Awesome. So, basically, I coasted it, along with English and French and art, while panicking about maths and chemistry and Irish.
Then, and finally, college. Passed the damned Leaving Cert, got free rein to chose again. History and Greek, archaeology and geography. Whittled down to archaeology and geography by second year. And then it all got interesting again! And this time, it got really, really interesting! This time, it gave me something real and tangible and theoretical all at once, opened the gates wide on what geography means and can mean, if given the chance. And I've fallen in love all over again.
Over the years, there have been subjects that ... that shape how I view the world. Geography has always been the basic one, through which I understand everything else. I mean that literally. Want me to learn history? Give me a map and a calendar, and show how things moved across them. Want me to learn physics? Show me tangible examples. I couldn't understand electricity for years, because no-one could explain it to me in terms of a physical entity. It wasn't until my dad came along with his water-pipe metaphor that I started to grasp it.
Geography, for me, is the lens through which the world makes sense. It's the nexus, that you feed all the other realms of knowledge into, and apply them to the real world. It's the synthesis of knowledge, that takes and touches all other branches, and relates them to how things were/are/might be.
There are things above or beneath geography, more fundamental in their way. Chemistry showed me the beneath, the tiny processes running through everything, underpinning the universe. And that was a massive, impossibly massive revelation for me. I failed that subject, by the by, in the Mocks, passed it by the bare skin of my teeth in the actual Leaving, but that didn't matter. That was because of the maths, and because when something rewrites the fundamental way I view things, as chemistry did, then it becomes somewhat difficult to describe in even a 3hr exam. Yeah, my worldview got turned on its head, and you want me to explain that to a timer? Not a good plan.
I never did get a chance to study physics, not yet, or astrophysics, which is the above. A whole scale of scales above anything, any human discipline. Geography comes close, sometimes, in the areas running on geological timescales, but there's a reason the word 'astronomical' is used to mean 'really, incredibly big'. Geologically, we're barely a blip on the radar. Astronomically, we don't even signify. We don't register. And yet those massive scales impact us every day, in rapid bursts, or in the long, slow processes that drive the larger things. Planets. Our planet.
That's a huge part of the understanding geography has given me. That there are scales things happen at, both physical and temporal. That there are processes and interactions happening at every one of those scales, and between them. From the astronomical on down to the nuclear, from the eternities to the nanoseconds, mass and energy act, react and interact in an incredible, incalculable amount of ways. More than mass and energy, though. More than physical. People. Ideas. Spirits. All of them factor in, become processes in their own right, as important as any chemical bonding or physical destruction. Humans have a place in all this. We are a range of scales and processes all our own, and we affect all other scales and processes, same as all others affect us.
That's the other lesson from geography. The ... the connection. It goes back to what I sensed as a six year old child, that things can be put into a context, a real context, and by doing that they can be understood. That's what geography does. That's what it is. It's understanding those vast and tiny interactions as a context, and inside them, humanity. Geography is the window through which we understand how humanity as it is now fits into the myriad physical and social processes that have shaped the world around us, on scales from the vast to the minute.
Well. That's the end product, anyway. For me. That's why you study all the others. Science. Philosophy. Economics. Sociology. Astrophysics. Geography is where and how you bring them all back and relate them to humanity in the here and now, build the context of interactions that shapes us and the universe we live in.
Why? For me, because I want to understand. But understanding how and why we are, where we fit, how we fit ... isn't that the only way to control how we move on? Isn't that what people want? Predictions. What's going to happen next. So much of geography does seem focused on that, on predicting the weather, the economics, the climate ... all the facets of life. When we understand them, we hope, we can control them.
We're not going to, of course. It's building models. I build models in my head, you know. It's how I learn things. Learn how they work, the basic processes, and build a model in my head. Then in specific instances I can plug in the new info and let it run. But there are problems with models like that. Because no system that you can build in your head or on a computer is ever the way you think it is. That's because people only ever build models of isolated systems, or what they think are isolated systems, and they don't actually exist. Because of what I said above. Because everything is connected, all the myriad systems and interactions, and they're always in motion, always changing (though at different scales), always affected by and affecting each other. So unless you account for all possible systems interacting with the one you're trying to model, it's never going to be perfect or even especially accurate.
Until we can understand and model the universe in its entirety, we'll never be able to tell the future, or control everything around us the way we dream. Congratulations, we are not yet God, or any version thereof.
Getting back to geography, and away from philosophy/theology (though they're not necessarily separate, as far as I see them) ... That's why I study geography, how I understand it, what I use it for. It's the closest thing to all-inclusive that I've found. It makes me see the universe and humanity, and my place inside it in a whole new way, a way that constantly shifts and becomes clearer or foggier as new ways of thinking or new information is brought into the subject, either from the specific studies inside itself, or from the other subjects it connects to. Geography isn't a subject, as such, not a static roll of information. It's a way of seeing, a way of thinking, that opens up the mind and lets it see things in a vaster context. It's a way for me to connect in a very real and tangible sense to the world around me.
Basically? It makes the world make sense. What more could you want?
