EcoBliss: Joyful Car-Free Living, Part 2

My newest bike, barely a year old, Holly GoLightly.
(A Giant like Genevieve.)

Listening to right now: Amelie Soundtrack

Today's Happiness Formula: Rediscovering music that is transcendent and makes me feel filled and slightly floaty at the same time.

Relevant-to-this-Post Headline: I've been told that our Erie Mayor will be announcing a bike-to-work week, which will take place May 12th to the 18th. Details about other activities will be forthcoming!

After deciding that giving up our car for a year's experiment was a go, I looked at everything we did on a regular basis and figured out how to do it without a car.

The only thing I could not get to without a car was cat litter. Yes, cat litter! We went through a lot of it, having multiple cats, and the bags were too big and heavy for a bus ride.

So I looked into the idea of an occasional car rental, which turned out to be very cheap on weekends through Enterprise. (And they are not paying me to say this!)

That was that. Fast forward seven years and we rent very little. Perhaps 8 weekends a year. Holidays, family out of town visits -- that sort of thing.

Now, if you have children, your first line of defense for you car will be them, so I direct you to a blog about a family living car free.

But WHY do this, you may still be asking, so here's the list, and it's certainly not exhaustive:

**It slows you down to a more human pace of life. Were we meant to go 70 miles an hour? When I look at the anger on people's faces in their cars, I know the answer is "no."
**It's great for your overall health. No more gym. No more stress. Driving, now that I don't do it all the time I can notice this, driving really shoots adrenaline into your system. It's a trying-to-survive thing.
**You notice things about where you live that you would have never noticed in a car. And you'll feel more invested in where you live because of this.
**You won't spend as much. The average car -- and this is an 8 year old stat from a book by Katie Alvord -- costs 5 to 7 thousand a year. And every time you think of some little thing you "need," it's so easy to jump in the car and get it -- no more.
**You won't be running around all the time. Whenever we do rent, we run some errands, and I think about how people do this kind of running almost daily. Two days of it every couple of months almost drives me batty.
**You'll have more time to do what really matters. Since you won't be running around so much and since you'll have more disposable income and maybe can cut back on work that you don't like (if that's the case), you can spend quiet time with your family, plant a vegetable garden, read poetry, paint a masterpiece -- listen to your heart's yearnings.
**Be European wherever you are! Living without a car makes me feel like I live in a village. And when I have flowers in my front basket and fresh produce in my back basket, I can imagine I live in one of those very Miss Marple towns (but without the murder, thank you!).

Nothing simplifies your life like getting rid of your car.

And now the harder stuff (you knew it was coming):

**We are at war for oil. Period. Wars are always about resources. And this war will turn into more wars, if we don't figure this out.
**This problem is one of demand and not one of supply, as we are treating it. We must take responsibility for this war every time we fill our gas tanks and it doesn't matter how you vote -- if you drive every single day by yourself in a car when there are other options. We can find other "fuels" but in fifty years we will discover the error of our ways yet again. Nothing is perfect. Every fuel comes at a price.
**We subsidize our addiction by taking away from some of the solutions. Our roadways, our gas prices, our car manufacturers -- all of them take government subsidy money away from railways and buses, more efficient forms of transportation, bike paths, and on and on.
**The problem does not stop at fuel: the manufacture and subsequent disposal of that car wears on the environment in a larger way than the extraction of the fuel that goes into it.
**This list will not go into the details of all the death: human, animal, and otherwise.

Al Gore called the truth of all of this "Inconvenient," and yes, for many people, that is how simple it is, and so they continue to choose convenience.

But there is so much more to this issue that has to do with the beauty of our humanity...

the connections to nature that we are missing...

the infinite power of our imaginations that we are denying every time we take the easy way...

the lives that we are missing and exchanging for speed and consumption.