16 - The Freedom of Limitations
I think it was my son who recently asked: “How do you get enough food if you just bike to the grocery store? It must get pretty dull making double round-trips every time you need to eat…”
This was a reasonable assessment: the side-bags, when empty, flatten to almost nothing, like deflated balloons. And even filled, we are talking about two to three plastic grocery bags of goods. How long can that last you, before you’re on your bike again, chasing down the evening meal?
“Bike” by Vesnet @ DeviantArt.com
Surprisingly, quite a long time. Popular marketing and culture in the US of A long ago abandoned quality for quantity, allowing volume to power our economy (making a few groups obscenely rich and obscenely powerful in the process); and in the wink of an eye we surrender the right of discernment. If your shopping cart is the size of a shipping container, well, you tend to fill it. If the soda jar – I use the word carefully, since “cup” implies eight ounces – is enormous… well, the tendency is to fill empty spaces with stuff, and those empty spaces often come in forms that are physical, psychological, and spiritual.
What I have found fascinating and delightful, in these months of shopping with two smallish hand bags, is becoming more familiar with what I need and what I don’t need, and more skilled at making simple, quick choices. Limitations demand discernment (discern, I suppose, or starve), and the quality of my meals has increased – no room for junk food, sorry – while portion size has resisted both the belly bulge and the supersizer’s club.
Cata and I will be looking for housing near one of Barcelona’s many walkable neighborhood markets, and pedestrian shopping may become even more selective and even fresher than bicycle shopping, as I will need to carry my daily bread without the aid of gears. Looking forward to it! Well, it is heading my way at 100 kpm: me, standing in the tracks, watching time barrel down on me.
The second limitation is space. Remember the McMansion? That’s a cute phrase, but it should actually bring a grimace instead of a smile, and pain instead of humor. I have lived in various circumstances over the course of my life, and never happier than when the maintenance of my possessions demanded a small portion of my attention and effort (and money). The intimate and simple dwelling was so much better than the beautiful old farmhouse, whose echoing rooms were closed off due to disuse and cost of heating, whose broad landscape needed but never received a gardening crew to manage, and whose woods cried out for trails and a meditation hut but never ever would have received them.
We move from the unconscious hunger that seems to occupy so much of America these days, to a culture that never quite got traction into supersizion (pronounced soo-per-CIZH-un), built a city for people instead of cars, and apartments long enough ago that they fit the inhabitants, instead of all the inhabitants’ crap.
There will be plenty of challenges of a local flavor: I trust it won’t feel like the eating contest we’ve got going on in 2010s America.