Dear Trivian,

Fockin' hippies

(previous letter to Trivian is here)

I finished my last letter to you with the promise of getting into your head, explaining to you and to me what I thing is going on in your mind, which, I realize only now, is out of my reach. I'm sort of trying to imagine you as you exist and make you up at the same time.

It's been a while since we divorced nature, with technology's help. One hundred years ago people where still sitting in darkness and cold for most of their winter days, looking at each other blankly, sharing one single candle. We do not want to be that close to nature ever again. And slowly but surely, we harnessed the power of science and made ourselves less cold, and our rooms less dark, until we reached the passive house era, where, seemingly by magic, there is almost no need for any heating, and the space keeps a constant 23 degrees all of January. But there's a catch.

Going out of your 23 degrees comfort zone, even a tiny bit, feels strange suddenly. A soft wind makes us shiver. One mustn't open the window. The outside is just too much. This is my uneasy feeling about passive houses. Noises, smells, heat, cold, wind, rain, sunshine, nature itself becomes a stranger, the other. But we are not other to nature, are we? Only a hundred years ago, weren't we still valiantly living 90 percent of our lives outside? Whereas we now live 90 percent of our lives cooped up inside, heads in screen.

There is a concept that is gaining ground nowadays in sports, intermittent fasting and cold exposure buffs: hormetic stress. Controlled, acute stress that can trigger a healthy adaptive response. Think muscle formation when working out, or the way you get better at dealing with certain types of situations after being repeatedly exposed to them. Or hating cold showers less after a while of daily exposure (I'm not there yet) . Well, the same goes the other way around right? If you get less than enough exposure to some sort of stimulant, you get vulnerable to it. If you don't move your body, it gets soft, if you don't socialize, you grow wild. I kjow I do. If you grow in a tighly controlled environment, your response to environmental change weakens.

So where does that bring us with regards to our super duper passive homes? Are we growing weak? Are we loosing the exercise of being in nature, of handling changes in temperature, of being outside?

I'm sitting here writing this with the dogs’ snoring and the fire crackling in the stove as my background noises. But it's late, and when this log burns out, I'm not going to feed the fire again until tomorrow morning. It's January and the house temps range from 15 C to 22 C throughout the day. I've come to appreciate these swings after realizing they keep me close to what's going on outside, to nature, of which I am a part as well, still. I know, how Henry David Thoreau of me! Fockin’ hippies..

I know what you’re going to say, so I’ll be thinking about it:)

As always,

Yours,

Jo