You are reading the ongoing writing process for a new book of daily reflections/meditations. Already published by this author is “Cast A Long Shadow”, 90 daily reading for our journey through life. This book is now available as a Kindle e-book, (you don’t need to have a Kindle to download and read it on your computer) as well as still being available direct from the publisher, on Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk and other Amazon European sites
Atmosphere
There are sometimes things that we can somehow sense, without being aware of just how – and one of them is the atmosphere of a place or a building.
Sometimes we can go into a space and know something about it inside of us, apparently without knowing anything about it.
Some of this feeling of atmosphere comes, I am sure, from deep cultural instincts.
When we walk into a room and everyone stops talking, we may say that there was a bad atmosphere, but actually, we are just attuned to how other people react, and are responding accordingly.
Equally, if I walk into a room and people smile and greet me, it is not necessarily an intangible “atmosphere” that I am picking up on, so much as the body language cues of those around me.
So when, for example, we walk into a church or temple, we will bring with us our own conceptions of what such a building should feel like.
We may expect it to be calm and contemplative, and so that is what we go in looking for.
Or we may think that all religious feeling is misguided at best, and so enter the building expecting to find mambo-jumbo rhetoric and hostile people, and be extra guarded against the people there.
But that does not explain all of the feeling of atmospherics that we feel.
For example, I have my own set of conceptions of what a church “should” feel like.
But I have been in churches that have felt like they were just buildings, others that felt more like a market – but also others that filled me with a sense of awe and reverence.
I could probably find rationalizations for the different feelings – maybe one spelled of candles which brought back a childhood memory, or another was noisy and brash, and it seemed to be about money.
But these are trivial cues – there is still an “other0ness” about some places that seems not at all connected with their physical presence.
After all the logic has been used up, it sometimes just comes down to being something in the atmosphere.
