Sunday, December 09, 2007

On barely commuting

The Toronto Star is running a series on commuting. This makes me weep with joy that I live where I do and have such an easy commute. It seems the factor driving people to live so far away from their workplaces is that they want to live in the countryside near nature, so I'm also very happy that I don't need this. (I don't mean this in a smugly zen "Oh, look at me, I managed to free myself from my needs" sort of way, I just...don't need it, the same way I don't need to play hockey.)

It probably seems weird that I keep mentioning this, but it really took an astounding amount of self-knowledge and overcoming stereotypes for it to even occur to me to live here like this. When I was growing up, I was surrounded by values like "Houses good, apartments bad." and "Nature good and healthy and desireable, cities bad and smelly and crime-ridden and something to escape from." People lived in apartments and in cities when they were poor, when they were students or newlyweds, and then moved to houses in suburbs or in the country once they started making proper grownup white-collar money. The only person I knew who lived in an apartment was my friend who was being raised by a single mother who was sometimes on welfare (an unusual situation for that time and place). The only people I knew who lived in a city were my grandparents, who were considered poor in the way that seniors living in small houses on fixed incomes generally are. My parents would drive us by the shabby urban apartment building and the tiny urban house where they used to live before they had kids whenever they thought we were becoming ungrateful little brats. But in general, it wasn't even the sort of value your parents tried to instill in you, it was just there, unquestioned. Google = how you find stuff on the internet. Coffee = what to drink if you need a pick-me-up. Beatles = good music. And houses in the suburbs = good, apartments in the city = bad.

So to end up here, I had to have a personal paradigm shift on par with if you suddenly came to the realization that Google was useless to you. But reading about these commutes, I'm glad I did.

1 comment:

laura k said...

"It probably seems weird that I keep mentioning this, but it really took an astounding amount of self-knowledge and overcoming stereotypes for it to even occur to me to live here like this."

I really relate to this.