Transplant, Grow Anew

Artwork by Jo Waterhouse

We are trained to think of environment as backdrop, but the body does not experience surroundings as a movie set. It processes them. Pace, noise, density, language, light, and social codes register and accumulate. The nervous system is always adjusting its capacities. In the United States, I have learned to metabolize urgency as normal. Conversations must be efficient and there is a quiet expectation that you justify your presence with productivity. In Spain, the rhythm is slow and far less focused on work. Quickly, something in my baseline has shifted. I did not decide to become calmer. Rather, my tempo biologically recalibrated. The low-grade sympathetic activation I had mistaken for motivation eased, my breathing deepened, muscle tension softened, attention widened.

In a high-velocity environment, vigilance looks like competence. In a slower one, it looks like tension. In one place, ambition is oxygen. In another (like Spain) it can feel like noise.

Soil determines what a plant can absorb. It does not dictate the plant’s species, but it influences its growth pattern, its resilience, its yield. The plant is not weak for responding to its substrate, it is an active member of it. In a similar way, environment shapes what becomes available to us psychologically. Cortisol levels, attention spans, and tolerance are not purely ours. They are responsive.

There is a persistent cultural story that the strong person remains unfazed by context, though basic research in perception and embodied cognition suggests that we think with and through our surroundings. We move and adapt to the rhythms around us and each beat inspires different expression. The idea that the mind stands apart from place begins to feel less like strength and more like a misconception. Relocating exposed this in a way no abstract argument could. Creativity feels less performative. Conversations wander without anxiety. But none of this makes one city superior to another. Each soil grows something. New York City grows urgency, density, ambition, compression. Valencia grows continuity, embodied presence, relational time. Both are ecosystems. The point is not to romanticize slowness or demonize speed. It is to notice that we are metabolizing these conditions.

The metaphor extends beyond geography. Digital environments function as soil, too. A phone feed trains the nervous system toward attentional scatter. A stable, embodied social environment can restore continuity. Over time, these inputs alter what feels natural, like how long we can focus, how quickly we become bored, what we interpret as cool or lame. We tend to moralize these shifts by calling ourselves “disciplined” or “distracted” without examining the substrate. Relocation made this visible because it stripped away the familiar feedback loops. Moving countries became less about reinvention and more about observation. It revealed how much of “me” was co-authored by place. We are organisms in exchange with terrain.

The soil we stand in routes emotional impact to the brain the way nutrients route to roots. Over time, those nutrients influence what grows. Changing soil does not transform you into someone else. It shifts the range of what you are likely to become.