You sit in your living room. It’s some kind of in-between-time, as in, nothing of particular note is going on. In this idleness, you have company: Your friend Jasper sits on the sofa to your left. Grandpa dozes in the armchair to your right. Patty the dog lays at your feet. Melvin the cat warms your lap. And while you don’t see them, there are a couple of ants crawling just below Patty’s nose. 

This motley crew and you are all posted up in this same room – your living room – but each one of you is living something totally different. Technically, in all of your lines of vision, there is a piano, but your dog can’t see that far and grandpa is blinder than the glasses he’s had since his last visit to the ophthalmologist – six years ago – account for. Jasper and you both see fine but whereas you don’t really give a rat’s ass about music beyond shuffling your liked songs on Spotify, Jasper is a jazz pianist, so while yes, you could say you both see the piano, you more register that it’s there, whereas Japser fixes his gaze on it like a hungry dog staring at a hunk of steak. Speaking of which– someone in the house is cooking dinner. Your dog is going berserk because his sense of smell is, well – seeing as he’s a dog – insane. It could be Wagyu beef or Costco chicken for all you know (turns out it’s farmer’s market pork), all you can say for sure is that the oven is probably on and there’s garlic involved somewhere. In the background is some light music grandpa turned on this time yesterday, but he doesn’t know how to turn the Sonos off, plus he doesn’t hear it anymore, you do but just barely, and Jasper is totally distracted by the sight of the piano so he doesn’t, but the cat can think of nothing other than this sonata, and the dog, if it weren’t for the pork smell, would be totally transfixed, but due to the pork, fluctuates between mostly-hearing and mostly-smelling. The ants busy themselves with some saltine crumbs on the floor. None of the rest of you are at all aware of the teensy crumbs, just as the ants could give no nevermind to Beethoven, nor roasting meat. 

Umwelt: in German the word means, simply, “environment.” In the study of perception, it describes an organism’s experience of the world as it is shaped by their sensory capabilities and perceptual systems. Umwelt means we’re all living in the same world but like– not really. 

Within a species, among people with whom we share general see-smell-hear-touch-taste abilities, our preferences still differ. Nature, nurture, pressures, privileges, aesthetics, identities– a lot of reasons why, probably, but ultimately what it means is that there are moments when the people we love delight in things that bore us, and vice versa. So what to do? 

When I decide I’m not into something – like amusement park rides or soccer or going to watch the sunset (or sunrise, God forbid) – I opt out. But at the same time, I like to think of myself as a curious person, of the willing-to-try-things sort, which is at odds, sometimes, with this easy opting out. Drawing on the concept of Umwelt, then, I have begun experimenting, seeing if maybe, with an active awareness of my Umwelt, I can have some say over which senses I tune into, and when. With this control, I might be able to make sucky moments less sucky and sometimes even turn them into totally awesome ones.

I tested it out the other day when a volcano erupted.

A friend of mine who uses expletives sparingly let out a whole slew of them, at 11pm as we were walking back slightly drunk, thoroughly fed and absolutely content in Guatemala last week. It was indeed a fucking volcano, per her initial inquiry (is that a fucking volcano?!). It wasn’t that I wished it weren’t (a fucking volcano), it’s just that I was, as aforementioned, just the right amount of blissed and fed and drunk that I was not seeking any additional, surprise forms of stimuli, of which a fucking volcano would surely be one. If I’d had it my way, the evening would have continued on as I’d planned it in my mind: These two delightful friends and I would go to our cozy room and pontificate, circularly and while eating jelly beans, until we fell asleep. Alas, it seems that when a volcano is erupting, one changes plans. Fuego, one of the world’s largest active volcanoes– and which stands just 35 km outside of Guatemala City– had decided to go full ham. We headed up to the roof. 

On the roof there was – to their delight! – a spectacular view of this stream of fire shooting up into the sky. Furthermore, up there on the roof, it was cold, cold enough to permeate the thickish fluff wall surrounding my splendidly tipsy brain, and so I was keenly aware of my being cold. Plus disappointed because all the many things I’d like to discuss with these fabulous friends would have to wait, seeing as, apparently, convention dictates that when a volcano is erupting before you, you talk about it (the volcano). Delighting in delighting, as I do, there was the added grievance, to this cold volcanic situation, of: why can’t I be moved by this? Out loud to my friends I chimed in with an appropriate “woah this is crazy” here and there but behind the curtains (my mind) I was feeling pissed at this volcano for stealing my friends from me. What is this, a talent show? Telepathically, I commanded it to Cease! Immediately!

Alas it did not heed. What I wanted to do, then, was hop on down from that cold roof, call the natural miracle chapter of my day over, and get into bed with my copy of Vanity Fair. I debated there for a sec, feeling more obliged than normal to stay and feign interest because it was one of the two friends’ twenty-first birthday eve’s. Yes, at just about midnight on this friend’s twenty-first birthday, which she had chosen to spend with me and friend-two in Guatemala, there was an epic volcanic eruption and we had a perfect view of it right from the sprawling rooftop of our fantastic accommodation which her parents had paid for for their daughter’s twenty-first birthday. Nevertheless, I was freezing and underwhelmed and wishing for a volcano-less night. I’d tried, once, twice, thrice, to feel awe at the spectacle of this fiery mountain, but nope, just wasn’t going to happen.

And then – can you guess? – I remembered Umwelt. Sight was proving boring as hell, clearly. A dig through my pockets revealed: Nothing to eat (taste). Smell? Eh. Mostly neutral. Hint of rotting fruit. Speck of cat piss. So I closed my eyes and tuned into the voices of these two friends, savoring their cute nerdy words. The nerdier of the two (in many regards, including scientific topics of the volcanic sort) reported to the other that “this fire is five hundred feet tall” (he hails from the metric system but can think in feet after a year among us and our strange ways), to which she responded “what actually is five hundred feet though?” and he said “picture a building in New York that has fifty floors.” He didn’t even want to use the word “stories,” lest it complicate an elementary description even one ounce. This particular friend, who would not use the term “genius” to describe himself but likely is one by official measures, also happens to be the single least know-it-all person I know (even though, as aforementioned, he kind of knows it all). Down this thought train (feeling awe, re: my friend) I forgot, for a minute, to be bored by the volcano. 

Friend-two, now able to conceptualize the magnitude of the shooting fire, started to compare the hues in it to various oranges she’d encountered. As a prolific and immensely talented painter, this friend sees color in a way that makes you think there must be two definitions of “color” and the one you know is like thinking the word “People” refers to the magazine everyone sees and doesn’t buy in the grocery store, as opposed to the definition of “people” that is breathing eating shitting thinking human beings. 

By now I’d fully surmounted my boredom. Not by forcing ooooo’s and ahhhh’s as I had been before, or by “picturing a fire” the way you’re told to do when you’re super freaking cold (kind of ironic that I’d have to do that since there was a fire of decent size right in front of me)– I’d combatted boredom by centering listening, by leaning into friend-one’s description of the eruption as “like being at the cinema” and friend-two’s as “the most beautiful gallery exhibit” she’d ever seen. For me, this was not a movie nor a spectacle of art. This was a podcast. The sight of the fat hot rock chunk did little for me. My friends’ reaction to it, on the other hand, was something I wanted to eat up every bite of and then lick the plate clean.

I remember the order to “romanticize life” as it came down straight from the Gods, or maybe Tik Tok, during the pandemic when life was (figuratively though often also literally) celibate. In a lot of ways, I think “romanticize life,” suggests, in a much less nerdy way, that we “control our Umwelt.” If we are intentional about which senses we lean into at which moments, might we be able to create worlds we like for ourselves, and to transform boring experiences into scintillating ones? 

Next time you’re sitting there, with Jasper, your grandpa, your cat, your dog, and some ants: how best will you enjoy the moment? Which senses should you tap into and which should you do your best to ignore?

Let us be the person whose taste buds are neutral on the subject of sushi but who goes out for sushi anyway because other people love it and we find delight in watching the chefs make the rolls and in the weird ass names for they get on the menu (“Mitt Romney Roll” and “Mango Go Man Go Roll Roll”) and because using chopsticks is fun for our fingers. We can say we’re not the biggest fans of minigolf and go anyway when we’re invited because it’s mesmerizing to watch full grown people get huffy over which color balls they get and funnier still watching someone practice a thing as a swing so many times before they actually take the swing, at a minigolf course hardly 100 meters off the side of US Highway one. Let us hike not for the views, if we don’t care for the views, but for the smell of pine in the forest and for the delightful Frito-reminiscent crunch of fall leaves, and fuck it, let’s eat Fritos while we step on the leaves for the sake of a double crunch. Everything tastes better in the woods. Take the reins on experience by tuning into the wrong senses at the right times. Umwelt is a shapeable thing.