[Last modified: November, 17 2024 11:52 AM]
Moving through my daily life in London sometimes feels like navigating without a map. Especially when I’m tired, or even when I am exploring somewhere new, my body sometimes struggles to find the correct path. Constantly switching which side of the sidewalk I’m walking on (also turning around in the middle of the pavement because I have most definitely walked the wrong way for the last ten minutes), getting bumped by passive aggressive men on the escalators in the underground, and the constant noise which oscillates wildly between overwhelming and comforting. For me, living in London so far has been a viscerally embodied experience, and one that has been, so far, remarkably different from my previous homes in rural Alberta and Metro Vancouver.
Yesterday, I was on the Picadilly line, headed west. My journey began by weaving through clusters of tourists in Russell Square station. Then, finding a place to squeeze in line for the lift, and subsequently, squeezing into the lift itself. This journey was marked by re-negotiation of my own body within a constantly changing physical and social environment. Sometimes, like yesterday, there’s no way to avoid having a tourist run over your foot with their suitcase. Sometimes, like yesterday, there’s no way to avoid the tourists studiously blocking the doors with their own bodies. For me, the tube has come to represent the essence of my embodied experiences in London. For, in many ways, it is an amalgamation of London life: busy, physically and mentally demanding, and always changing.
As I navigate myself down and below the city, my body is constantly facing new obstacles: no matter how many times I take the same journey, I never experience it in the same way twice. Sometimes, the tube comes and it is empty and I am able to sit down and rest for a few important moments. Sometimes, the tube comes packed, and I think, ‘there’s no way anyone else will fit’… but Londoner’s always find a way, almost inconceivably, to fit more people onto the tube.
In taking the underground since I moved to London, I have become necessarily more aware of my body. Where I am going, how I am going to get there, and how much energy it takes to simply move through London life are all new aspects of my life that are very much determined by how my body exists, how I experience it within this new context, as well as how it is perceived to exist in the hustle and bustle of the city. I wonder, as per my pilot project, how my experiences would change if my dog was here, and how my (and his) embodied experiences would potentially co-constitute each other as a source of stability in an ever-changing urban environment…
