A decade ago in Boulder, I stumbled upon a tattered edition of a 1980 book called "Education at the Edge" about Outward Bound and its founder Kurt Hahn, who feels very similar to Willi Unsoeld. Highly recommended book, if you can find it. From the Wikipedia page about Hahn, some of his core beliefs about education:
1) Give the children opportunities for self-discovery.
2) Make the children meet with triumph and defeat.
3) Give the children the opportunity of self-effacement in the common cause.
4) Provide periods of silence.
5) Train the imagination.
6) Make games (i.e., competition) important but not predominant.
7) Free the sons of the wealthy and powerful from the enervating sense of privilege.
Having a home in the city for the excitement of the human realm and one in the country for the tranquility of nature always seemed like a lovely idea. And it appears to be a universal longing.
The key is to visit the country home regularly rather than turning it into an Airbnb, at which point it becomes a business and a burden rather than a place of refuge.
My husband and I have been psychologically bouncing between our inner country mouse and our inner city mouse for years. We’ve spent the past decade in Amsterdam, but just last year purchased a little stone house in an Italian hill town. In the evenings, you can walk five minutes to the edge of town, and there’s the Nera River, gleaming far down the valley like a silver ribbon in the dark. The place has stood for centuries, and feels like a good compromise between being next to our neighbours and being just a few minutes from walking trails through the beautiful Umbrian hills. I don’t know that it’s so unnatural to live in the in-between the way they do in Umbria. It’s how they’ve lived for millennia.
That said, this week I wrote a whole post on my climate anxiety and where to live. I think about this all the time.
I'm way too literal sometimes 😅
For the record—the whole argument was an elaborate analogy, not real estate advice :D
That Willi Unsoeld quote is so good. I really needed to hear that when I was in my early twenties, flirting with my own version of "Into the Wild": https://letters.blakeboles.com/p/channeling-christopher-mccandless
A decade ago in Boulder, I stumbled upon a tattered edition of a 1980 book called "Education at the Edge" about Outward Bound and its founder Kurt Hahn, who feels very similar to Willi Unsoeld. Highly recommended book, if you can find it. From the Wikipedia page about Hahn, some of his core beliefs about education:
1) Give the children opportunities for self-discovery.
2) Make the children meet with triumph and defeat.
3) Give the children the opportunity of self-effacement in the common cause.
4) Provide periods of silence.
5) Train the imagination.
6) Make games (i.e., competition) important but not predominant.
7) Free the sons of the wealthy and powerful from the enervating sense of privilege.
A beautifully written analogy 👌💚
Having a home in the city for the excitement of the human realm and one in the country for the tranquility of nature always seemed like a lovely idea. And it appears to be a universal longing.
The key is to visit the country home regularly rather than turning it into an Airbnb, at which point it becomes a business and a burden rather than a place of refuge.
My husband and I have been psychologically bouncing between our inner country mouse and our inner city mouse for years. We’ve spent the past decade in Amsterdam, but just last year purchased a little stone house in an Italian hill town. In the evenings, you can walk five minutes to the edge of town, and there’s the Nera River, gleaming far down the valley like a silver ribbon in the dark. The place has stood for centuries, and feels like a good compromise between being next to our neighbours and being just a few minutes from walking trails through the beautiful Umbrian hills. I don’t know that it’s so unnatural to live in the in-between the way they do in Umbria. It’s how they’ve lived for millennia.
That said, this week I wrote a whole post on my climate anxiety and where to live. I think about this all the time.