I get frustrated when I drive a car around Los Angeles. I feel simultaneously blessed to have such a useful resource to move me and my belongings around. I want access to the car in this freeway culture. I want to log a much higher percentage of my miles by bike.
I am wasting time thinking up scenarios where I don't have to drive so often anymore. They usually involve moving closer to my job or finding a job closer to home. Either possibility is frightening, and foolish since I know I will do neither in the immediate future. I still turn my wheels, spending energy dreaming up a reality that doesn't exist. (My house magically moves itself out west! My job miraculously moves 5 miles inland after 15 years in the same location!)
Then I dream about carpools with bike racks and other more plausible plans, but those, too, are hard for me in a city where I don't know a huge amount of people like I did in my old Home. Resource sharing takes community building takes time. I am not a patient lady. I want what I want now! Change! I would probably be the perfect revolutionary: constantly sloughing off the present in hopes for a more functional future. I know though that there are certain things I am not willing to risk, certain comforts I don't want to put through the process of change. I want to hold on to certain things: my husband! a home! a laptop! Take away everything else and leave me these. ...and maybe our cat and some cute clothes and good books and my old diaries and photographs... Once I really look deep I wonder how much I will gamble to really have it all.
And all the time I dream away, maintaining status quo at home. Dreaming of short, easy commutes by bicycle as I drive my minivan into the sunrise.
