Cities Run on Clocks; Bodies Remember Rivers

The first time I took Arash to see my village, he fell asleep within minutes of reaching the mango grove. Not the exhausted sleep of overstimulation, but the deep, trusting sleep of recognition—as if his body remembered something his mind had never learned.

In Dhaka, he fights sleep like an enemy.

There’s something our bodies know that our minds have forgotten: we evolved in rhythm with natural cycles, not fluorescent lights and traffic horns and the constant hum of machinery trying to make life more efficient. When I sit by the pond in my grandmother’s village, my breathing automatically slows to match the gentle lapping of water against the bank. In the city, my breath is shallow and quick, synchronized with sirens and construction noise and the artificial urgency of deadlines.

Cities demand that we move faster than our nervous systems were designed to handle. Every corner brings new decisions—which way to turn, whom to avoid, where to look, what to buy. Our ancestors made maybe a dozen significant choices per day. I make that many before breakfast, and my body keeps score in muscle tension and sleep disruption and the constant low-grade anxiety that feels normal because everyone around me carries it too.

But it’s more than stimulation. Cities are built on the premise that nature is something to be conquered, controlled, paved over. We live in boxes stacked on top of other boxes, separated from the ground by layers of concrete and the delusion that we can exist independently of the earth that feeds us. The anxiety we feel isn’t just overstimulation—it’s the deep unease of living against our own design.

In the village, Happy spends hours just watching clouds move across rice fields. When I first witnessed this, I felt restless, as if she were wasting time. Now I understand she was doing something essential: remembering that we’re part of a larger system that operates on a different schedule than our manufactured urgency.

Nature operates on what the mystics call “eternal time”—the slow patience of seasons, the unhurried persistence of growth, the ancient rhythm of birth and decay and rebirth. Cities operate on “mechanical time”—the frantic tick of clocks that measure productivity, efficiency, profit. Our bodies are calibrated for eternal time, but we force them to live by mechanical time, then wonder why we feel constantly out of sync.

There’s also the question of scale. In nature, we’re appropriately small—part of something vast and intricate and beyond our complete understanding. This should be humbling, but instead it’s profoundly comforting. We don’t have to control everything because we’re not separate from everything. We can relax into our proper place in the larger web.

Cities create the illusion that humans are in charge, that we’ve transcended nature rather than being part of it. This illusion requires enormous energy to maintain—the energy of pretending we don’t need clean air, fertile soil, stable climate. The energy of believing we can solve problems with more concrete, more speed, more separation from the systems that sustain us.

But perhaps the deepest reason nature brings peace is that it reminds us we’re mortal—not in a frightening way, but in a way that puts our daily anxieties in perspective. The tree I lean against has survived droughts and storms and seasons I’ll never see. My problems, which feel so urgent in the city’s artificial light, become appropriately small under the vast indifference of stars.

Cities promise control but deliver anxiety. Nature offers no control but provides peace. This isn’t sentimentality—it’s biology. We are nature, temporarily organized into human form, trying to remember how to live in harmony with the systems that created us.

The tragedy isn’t that we live in cities. The tragedy is that we’ve designed cities as if we were machines rather than animals, as if we were separate from nature rather than expressions of it. Every time we feel that deep peace in a forest or by the ocean, our bodies are telling us something essential about who we are and how we’re supposed to live.

The question is whether we’re still capable of listening.