Atmosphere, the little things

The actual title I’d want to go here would be “Smells,” but I think that would just be a little bit strange for a title.

We had to write aspiration statements when we applied for the Peace Corps, and we had to provide some reasons for why we wanted to join, some of our motivations, etc.

I think most people, [as did I] included: help people, see the world, lean about new cultures and ways of life… the standards if you will. However, I recently got to experience something that I wrote about in addition to the standards – smell.

In high school, I went to El Hogar – the Home of Love and Hope in Tegucigalpa, Honduras with my church youth group. El Hogar is a home/foster home and school for abandoned, orphaned and impoverished boys in Honduras. One of the projects we worked on was fortifying the front guard wall of the school grounds in the city. This included tearing down some of the old concrete wall with sledgehammers and a jackhammer in preparation to add onto the wall.

Tegucigalpa gets a lot of short rain showers throughout the day. These were pretty strong, and gave a great excuse for a little break. But these rain showers did something else. They mixed with the concrete to create an amazing and lasting memory – the smell of wet concrete after summer rain.

Anyone who has worked in construction, and most people who have been near concrete and rain during the summer [this includes most people, look at the ground, you will notice that there’s a lot of concrete] should know what I’m talking about. It’s one of those small smells that you don’t really think about until it happens, then you immediately remember that it exists, returns after summer rain, and that it means something to you.

I wrote about this experience in my aspiration statement not just because it shows that I have traveled to developing countries to help people, or because it shows that I’m observant and can use adjectives – but because it was such a powerful experience related to trying new things within a setting of working to affect positive change. This is something I’m looking for here – powerful experiences, memorable experiences, maybe even something with wet concrete.

So, I got to experience something like this and reconnect with this memory last week during a run along the Danube River. There was the slight smell of concrete bordering the pavement on the road, there was the humid smell of plants in the sun near hot asphalt, and there was even some classic gas and diesel smell from the cars driving by. Just being aware of and noticing these little things adds to the power of an experience. With good background context, coming from the smells in the air, an experience gains a deeper seed in memory.

So, what is the macro message of all of this? It couldn’t really be: smell the world, could it? Well it could be, and that wouldn’t be wrong; but the larger macro message is – it’s important to pay attention to the little things.

These little things, like smell, create the context for our memories and lives; and sometimes, these little things become the memories themselves.