I'm walkin', yes indeed

West End whirligig

Some people prefer driving to do their normal business. Some prefer cycling, electric or "acoustic." These days, some probably prefer electric scooters or similar devices for getting around. My preferred modes of transportation are walking and taking transit.

It was after I crashed our Subaru in 2016 that I learned how much I could accomplish with my own two feet, public transit, and a two-wheeled grocery cart. I'm fortunate to be mostly able-bodied. My journeys aren't always the most pleasant, with snow or rain or packed buses or all three, but it feels good to have regained a little toughness that I had let slide away over the years. Even after we bought a used Nissan Versa, I continued to walk and take transit by default, using the car only when necessary.

One thing I love about walking and walking-plus-transit is that when I get to wherever I'm going, I don't have to store a vehicle. It's not always easy to find parking, it takes time, and most motor vehicle storage these days will cost you. A bicycle needs to be securely stored as well, and that requires a place to lock up and sometimes some amount of dismantling of the bike, plus carrying a helmet. Once I arrive at my destination, with my cart at most, I am free to do whatever errand I'm doing. I'm not sure I would be able to relax if I had an e-bike locked up somewhere.

Another thing I love is that my brain can be doing all kinds of things while I'm walking or on transit. I often use the time to work on songs. Sometimes I think through issues I'm dealing with. Sometimes I just ponder various and sundry things. I find walking a great time for contemplation. On a bus or SkyTrain, I tend to use my phone, read, or sometimes just look out the window, all things I can't do while operating my own vehicle.

Occasionally while walking I'll stop and take photos of plants. Sometimes I'll post on SeeClickFix because someone has allowed plant growth to take away a substantial amount of sidewalk space. I am a plant lover, but I'm militant about sidewalks for sidewalk users. Most are too narrow to start with.

If I get too deep in thought while driving, I am likely to end up the same way as I did six years ago, crossing an intersection I shouldn't have been in whilst getting smacked in the side by a vehicle with the right of way. Sometimes I don't even turn on the radio while I'm driving, because driving really requires all my attention. Same when I'm cycling. Even a recreational cyclist like me moves at speed, so I try to stay very aware of my surroundings. Are people really able to ride safely with headphones on?

Walking is also good exercise, of course. It's been a long time since I was a runner, and I don't think my knees would be happy if I started again, so walking is pretty much my only aerobic exercise. I tend to walk briskly to get the most aerobic benefit. Driving a car or any motorized vehicle is zero exercise. Cycling is great exercise, of course, although for real riders the point is to obtain speed, distance, and efficiency with the least amount of work.

I'm fortunate to live in a city and a part of that city where most of the errands I do are within a four-kilometre round trip. For me, that's a reasonable walk. I don't take transit very often within the city. I consider the slope up from the river, quite steep in places, to be an opportunity to increase my exercise level. When we first moved to this city, that hill seemed formidable, but before long I was power-walking both up and down. Although I no longer power-walk, I am still able to walk up even the steepest slope, and if I'm not knackered, I rather enjoy it.

I am a big supporter of replacing car trips with any kind of active transportation! I am a fan of my avid cycling friends. For my part, however, I will continue to replace car trips with walking and transit for as long as I am able. I have a lot to contemplate!

Birthday reality check

Reflection in SkyTrain car partition

Today is the 69th anniversary of the day of my birth in my personal year zero. I am now in my 70th year of travel through space-time. I am billions of kilometres distant from the point in space where my mother was when she sent me forth into my own existence. My position in spacetime is always in motion.

Lately, I've been thinking of my life as a streak through spacetime, a short trace with a beginning and an end. This is probably because I recently read Existential Physics by Sabine Hossenfelder. It gave me a lot of things to think about with regard to my place in the universe, ie, reality.

The streak, of colour perhaps, is my physical existence in spacetime, everything I learned, the mistakes I made, the times I triumphed, the small daily hits and misses, the connections to people and animals and plants and mycorrhizae, the things I've created, all the ways in which I made my minuscule impression on the four-dimensional fabric of reality.

I have a gravitational field. So do you. So does everything that has mass. My gravitational field is infinitesimal compared to that of the moon or the earth or any other large mass in the universe. Nonetheless, like everything with mass, I warp the spacetime around me. The effect is tiny, but it's real. I don't even have to have done anything. I affect the universe just by existing.

The space-timeline of the enormous and still expanding universe is 13.7 billion years and counting. My four-dimensional swoosh is a wart on a quark in a drop in the ocean. But it's not nothing. It counts. It has an effect. Many effects.

While I exist, one of my jobs is to make those effects beneficial and to minimize harmful effects. That's basically how I think of good and evil — that which helps, that which harms. Another is to try for a steady flow of beneficial effects. All of reality is just a little too big for my effects, so I hope they operate in spacetime closer to me.

In the concluding third series of His Dark Materials, which I recently watched, the dead are imprisoned in a perpetual, joyless, grey existence until the heroine Lyra frees them to rejoin the universe (or multiverse, as Philip Pullman put it). The shadows were overjoyed to be able to return to their home at last. That's how I feel about my death. I will be going back to the universe whence I came. It has always been my home. It gave me life, it will be my spacetime of eternal rest.

When my body ceases functioning, my consciousness will vanish and my streak in space-time will conclude but won't go away. It will always exist. It can't be undone. The universe is stuck with me for as long as its own timeline lasts.