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Space

It took me several years before my classroom looked anything near respectable. I remember a few colleagues noting calmly before my first year began how barren it looked with its blank walls. More concerned with how to teach, I was content to keep it that way, until a friend and colleague offered to help decorate. My attitude toward that classroom on that hot August day is similar to the one with which I treat my personal space in general. This, perhaps, reflects the sentiment that a person's sense of self is composed mainly in his character rather than his surroundings. Still, some of what a man is made of is visible on his person, the way he carries himself and the way he dresses. Should it be any different with the way he treats his personal space? An acquaintance once called my apartment, before I moved, "spartan." I suppose that comment, and my attitude toward my blank classroom, revealed just how inattentive I can be toward the outside world. This has its benefits and its drawbacks, I suppose, as you are just as likely to miss outward flaws as you are to notice something positive about yourself or others.

Maybe I'm not as sentimental as others are about their space, or maybe I haven't had the connection to places that others have. Whatever the reason, I don't believe I have a place about which I would be hurt upon learning it was destroyed. The question calls on our sense of nostalgia. Nostalgia I have, but it is a nostalgia more for memories with people, and not the places in which those memories took shape. I remember peanut butter pancakes on a Saturday morning with a best friend, but it could have happened in any home and been equally meaningful; I remember dinner with family just after spending a few days alone in New York City. Still, the memory could have been equally pleasant in another room of the house, another house in the neighborhood, or another neighborhood in the city, state, or country; but the warmth I remember from that cold autumn night would be just as powerful, not because it took form in a particular place, but because it took form among family.

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