From our strawberry patch.Listening to: Driving makes me feel like this.
Today's Bliss Formula: We were at a record high yesterday of 93 degrees, so this morning's 68 feels fabulous, and the plants are loving the rain we've gotten. It's nice not to be surrounded by sounds of fans.
As I've talked about here and here and here, we are car free but we do rent periodically to visit out of town family. Over the seven years we have been car free, we have managed to keep rentals below ten a year, sometimes around 6 or 8. No more, as I mentioned in yesterday's post, the new goal is 3.
When we first went car free, the rental weekend was a much anticipated time. I would get excited to be running around. (Not my partner, no, Frog has never been excited about cars.)
But I noticed, as time passed, that that excitement turned more and more into anxiety. After running around for more than a couple of hours, I would be completely outside myself. Off balance. Out of my center. Overstimulated and totally grouchy.
And now it takes days for me to recover -- both mentally and physically.
You may think I'm exaggerating, but I wonder how many problems of sleeplessness and depression and aching backs could be resolved if people would just stop driving, just stop moving at such unnatural speeds.
Because, you see, the problems around cars go far beyond the use of resources and the varieties of pollution (air and noise and water...) and the displacement of wild areas and their inhabitants. Far beyond.
Cars have created, just to start, a society without sidewalks. Think what that means. And if there are sidewalks, is there anyone walking on them?
Cars created suburbs, which creates sprawl and traffic and one hour one-way commutes and dead city centers and dead cultural centers.
Cars create speed and anger and impatience.
Cars are certainly culpable in our obesity epidemic but no one bothers to point that finger.
If you are an average American, and there is a good chance you are, did you know you get in and out of your car an average of ten times a day? That statistic is ten years old, by the way, and I can assure you, it is low.
So how do you feel in your car?
Are you spending a lot of time sighing, holding your breath, yelling, swearing? Be truthful.
Do you feel attacked and inconvenienced and personally affronted by the other cars?
Do you take it all personally?
Do you feel like driving is a competition?
I notice more and more of this each time I drive after not driving.
I also notice that I feel like crap, physically, after being in the car for even short bursts of time. This weekend we drove four hours and halfway there I noticed my right arm was asleep thanks to a pinched nerve in my shoulder thanks to the design of the headrest that forces our heads slightly forward on our spines.
My lower back hurt. My right hip ached. And when we got out of the car at a rest stop, I noticed a number of people having to carefully exit their cars and then stand and wait and then slowly start walking, working out their constricted muscles.
Hmmm...I wonder how well we all slept that night?
And what if you do this every day? What about repetitive stress injuries? Our bodies are made to move. We are designed, physiologically, to walk and stretch -- not to be confined.
And I wonder about the air we are breathing in our cars.
So there is the stress on the muscular and skeletal body, the stress on our hearts (due to the panic and anxiety and anger), the stress on our immune systems (again, panic and anger), the stress on our lungs (the bad air, the holding of breath, the constricted breathing).
(For a paper by two Phd psychologists, go here.)
And then there is the stress on our minds. The speed. The anticipation. The primal fear responses. As I mentioned yesterday, the awful combination of over-stimulation and boredom. The ever increasing need for this kind of stimulation all the time.
The need for speed.
No wonder we toss and turn in bed. No wonder our minds are racing, monkey minds that cannot handle even a moment of down time.
No wonder we are becoming a species of angry, self-important, competitive, unhealthy, fat, impatient animals.
We want everything right now. Fast. We want everything. We don't want to pay for it. It better be cheap. I don't have to change -- someone else will figure out how to keep me living like this.
We are committed to this misery. How many of us can truly claim happiness -- the kind that comes from deep inside and does not depend at all on having or being anything other than what we have and are?
It has to stop. This madness. But it seems it won't. Even my friends who claim to care, don't stop. Then there are those who can't even see the problem because they are so busy moving so fast. Hamsters on giant wheels.
So this is what renting makes me feel like. This is what renting a car makes me think about.
For me, cars and bliss just don't go together.
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