Life Without a Car: Year 2

I've lived in Utsunomiya now for two years. There have been adjustments. My living quarters are smaller and I no longer have a car. I'll talk about my apartment in another post, but today I want to focus on life without a car.

When I lived in the States, I often questioned my car dependency, but living in the suburbs, I succumbed to the addiction. I went everywhere by car: to the supermarket, to work, to friends, to the local coffee shop and the biggest absurdity of all, to the health club. What choice do most Americans have in reality?

In Seattle/Bellevue we were a two car family. I rode my bike with a friend on weekends, putting it in the back and hauling it out to the country somewhere. It was fun, however it wasn't transportation. It was exercise in the most compartmentalized way. The design didn't help. There was no basket. There was no kickstand. There was no clamshell integrated lock. It was just a way to have fun. My car became my feet. I paid the price

When I came to Japan in the fall of 2011, I was about 190 pounds, double chin, stomach bigger than I liked and climbing stairs took my breath away and not in the good sense. I got a bike in November of that year. It had a basket, a kickstand and a built in lock. I commuted to work on it, shopped with it, and  explored my city with it. It didn't take long until I noticed my double chin disappearing and my stomach receding. Climbing stairs no longer required panting. I weighed myself at the beginning of the next year and found that I had lost about twenty pounds. Of course, the bike wasn't the whole story. I was eating Japanese portions now. (They eat less than we do.) I was following the Japanese admonition, "Eat until your stomach is only 80% full" and I was indulging in sweets only on weekends. But being carless has had a huge impact on me beyond weight control and exercise.

One thing you notice when you no longer drive is that you notice. Life is a blur in a car. (Perhaps speed is part of the seduction.)  Life on a bike is slower. On a bicycle the things that were blurry now have sharp edges. I began noticing smaller changes than before. Plants budding, seasonal comings and goings of animals, temperature differences, and the weather itself. It's interesting. The Japanese calendar used to be divided into fairly minute parts, roughly ten day segments within a month. These subdivisions were given names such as "The Great Cold" and "Welcoming Spring" etc.  I never understood it until I started biking. Ten days is about the time it takes to notice changes in the season: whether things are getting warmer or colder, what is blooming or ripening, the color intensities of the natural world. Slowing down to bike speed and walking speed makes you take notice. It's a real blessing with the added benefits mentioned above. I never thought of biking as a spiritual experience, but it is. Just like most everything in life. It just takes some slowing down to notice it.