A Matter of People

21st April 2006, Singapore - People and places. People at places. People in places. People = Places.

We generally associate the places we love as being places we spend a lot of time at/in, the places we frequent, the places we're familiar with, places we know every nook and cranny of. But is it really the physical surrounding that makes us fall in love with places? Look beyond the furniture, the smell, the layout, amenities, architecture, landmarks, terrain, historical significance and climate and you'll come to realise that what gives places special meaning in our hearts are the people who were there.

People are the ones that make up the best memories we have in various spaces at different places. When you think of your office, your closest colleagues whom you lunch or work come to mind. When it's school, you look to the ones you've formed a clique with.

Recently, I spoke with an interviewee whom I learnt was a Monash graduate. He said he missed the place dearly when he completed his studies and returned home. (It sounded like my own experience.) So he returned to visit Melbourne a few years later - a place he'd grown fond of and missed. (Just like, me, I returned to Brisbane only two years after graduating.) But while both cities held good memories for both of us, we realised the places were no longer special or all that winsome.

When I revisited Brissie, I arrived with the same mental image and emotional imprint as I'd left with only a couple of years before. I made conscious effort to revisit the journalism department at university, Coffee Club in Toowong that served up magnificent delights of choice cakes and coffees, the mall in Indooroopilly I visited every weekend to do my grocery shopping. They were all places I'd spent many hours, days and months but the warm fuzzy feeling of reminisence was no where to be felt.

Why? Because the Journalism department meant Professor John Henningham and my course mates. The cafe was where we all congregated after Unicell meetings. The mall was where my flatmates visited every Saturday morning to stock up on food and other home essentials. They were good times then, but this around, these places were as cold as when I'd first set foot into them. The people then were no longer there now.

People make places matter to us and we make places matter to people. What's the matter? People.

May you love and enjoy the people in the different compartments, spaces and places of your life today. Because it can be very different tomorrow.