This field hasn’t changed much in the nearly 150 years since it was hemmed in by the human activity surrounding it. It may have been razed to the ground repeatedly in that time – to store train cars or materials on it, to park cars on it, to gather wood for bonfires or stoves or from a fire set by lightning or arsonists. But each time, many of the same plants that have thrived on it for centuries would come back; within a few years, the field would be recognizably itself, once again.
In the meantime, most of the human activity surrounding it aimed for endless, limitless growth (with the exception of the monastery, itself an oasis from the every-changing modern world.)
The train station, storage and other buildings built around that field over the years were no doubt proudly seen by their builders as a first step into a future where some day an even bigger train station would be built, to serve a much bigger city stretching around it. Indeed, the city has continued growing outwards in all directions, but such growth is never as even, steady and perpetual as progress-minded people often fool themselves into believing. For example, the era that the 10- and 12-story clothing factories in that area was built for barely lasted a couple of decades—a mere blink of an eye in the history of that vacant lot. The people who built the factories probably thought they’d one day be replaced with even bigger buildings, but right now many of them aren’t as full of tenants as they should be, and the atmosphere and infrastructure of this briefly “industrial” area is looking more and more out of place as other uses for these buildings evolve.
But have we learned our lesson? No—for a little while, city administrators started seeing a different sort of endless growth, that of a housing boom that would never end and that would transform the abandoned buildings and fields into a whole new growing neighborhood. Once again, an ambitious vision of rapid growth was laid out, but the vision had to again come back down to reality—a reality that is much more slow-moving and less hungry for growth than some people are willing to accept.
Nearby residents who have a modest vision of the lot’s potential in the short term — focusing on how it could best serve the people live near it and use it today — would ironically be better placed to see their efforts endure over the long term than those who imagine a whole new neighborhood about to pop up during this supposedly never-ending building boom.
In the end, humans are no less bound by the laws of nature than the rest of the natural world is. No plant or animal can keep growing bigger and bigger without ending up too far from its life-giving roots to be able to survive. Man often fools himself into believing that this time, he’s built an industry, a country, a scheme that will keep growing at a steadily increasing pace forever and ever, but such schemes can only stay aloft on the strength of dreams for so long before they become so unconnected from reality that they come crashing down.
The empty lot never had that problem – it never built itself back to more plants, more life than it could sustain for itself. Along with the monastery, it has been a silent witness to folly, perfectly content to be its modest self, taking things one sunrise at a time.