idle musings

One of the things that I have been thinking a lot about recently has been getting rid of my car. As in, no longer having one at all. For a short period of time I was thinking about buying a Honda Fit, which I still love and think are great cars. But then I stopped and asked myself why I wanted one.

Well, it would be great to take camping. And for moving in general, or stuff specifically. And it’s zippy. And I like the shape. And it would be really cool to have a brand new car! And I could get it in blue. And somehow it would contribute to me being the kind of person that I want to be.

Wait – what?

The kind of person that I am is a person who is deeply concerned with the environment. Any car, no matter how good on gas it is or how how “green” is still contributing negatively towards my footprint on this earth. So buying this car or being the owner of this car would not be contributing anything towards my strongly held conviction of being kind to the earth.

The rest of the reasons turned out to be bunk as well. Sure, it would be great to take camping, but my current Civic did just fine on my trip to Oregon this year and the north Island last summer. I can’t move houses for another two years and when I do I’ll have a moving truck. If I need to transport something large in the meantime, well, the Civic’s back seats fold down and I have a brother with a truck. The Civic is zippy. And has a nice shape. And no, it’s not blue, and I had hoped to have a vehicle that wasn’t silver because there are just so many silver cars on the road now, but it’s not the end of the world.

So my need for a new car boiled down in the end to consumerism – something I try to avoid in all other areas of my life. I have decluttered almost my entire house and have been ruthless in getting rid of stuff. When I buy anything new, I stop and think of whether it has a purpose or whether it will become a dust collector, forgotten on a shelf. I don’t want to load myself down with things because that isn’t who I am. And buying a new car for the sake of it isn’t who I am either.

All this deliberation led me to the idea of “what if I didn’t have a car at all?”

The idea of no longer having my own vehicle is a scary one. I’ve had my own car since 2000 but shared Mum’s car with her from the time I could drive. Since I was 16 years old I have had incredibly easy access to a car, and it has contributed to making me feel like owning a vehicle is my right, rather than a privilege. It has allowed me to build a life around the need to have a vehicle. Where I go to school, where I work, even the suburb that I choose to live in, have all been choices that I could make, based on the fact that I have a car.

I know there are organizations like the Co-operative Auto Network which would allow me to use a car for when I needed to go across town for something specific and couldn’t arrange with my parents to borrow one of their cars. I know that so long as it wasn’t a burden to them (and I kept the gas tank filled up) that my parents would be supportive of my choice. Now that I am working on the North Shore it seems like the perfect time to do this, as I could use a CAN car for school occasionally and otherwise bus to work. In fact, all the pieces seem to be there …

Except for Purple Dragon. Those of you who have followed me here from my LiveJournal know that in August 2008 I will be going to Trinidad to grade for my black belt. I have to be at the dojo almost every night from January onwards. I need to go to the gym to lift weights and run on the treadmill. These are commitments that I have made to myself to give myself the best chance I will have at achieving my jet black belt, rather than a lower rank of black with stripe of some sort. And because of where the dojo is located and where I live – I can’t do it on transit. From my house it would take me a bus, the seabus, the skytrain, and another bus. That’s about 60 minutes of travel time, times 2.

If I were still living alone, I could do it. But I took on the responsibility of caring for my cat, and that doesn’t just mean feeding him and cleaning out his litter box. It means being around to love him and give him attention, and if I am on the bus all the time, I can’t do that.

So my deliberations have led me to the conclusion that I cannot get rid of my car until after August, at the earliest, and possibly not until my time here at the house is done and I can move across the bridge and closer to the dojo. I can see a life over there, living and working and playing all in the same general vicinity, which would allow me to let go of my car and start to use my own two feet again. I am aghast when I realize how lazy I am about walking – I have moved my car a few blocks down the street when doing errands, rather than simply walk there and walk back. I used to love being outside – I wrote that and realized that I do still love it; I just don’t allow myself to do it that much anymore. Depending on where I move and where I work I could even get a bike!

Not factoring a car into the equation means that I will need to choose my neighbourhood carefully. I want to have dogs in a few years so I need parks nearby. I need to be close to a transit hub or a main transit line. I need to be within transit time to wherever I am working at that point, and I need to be (best case scenario) within walking distance to the dojo. It’s giving me an entirely different idea of what my life could look like, going forward – if I were to be car-free.