Today, I’m sitting in a cafe by a window watching the people pass. It’s a steady stream through the long paseo that is interspersed with trees, squares of bushes, benches, cafe terraces, and a park filled with children playing. The large stone pavers are finally dry for the first time in days. I feel invisible, like a mannequin in a window, until I make eye contact with someone and then I become flesh and blood again.
All these people walking! Since moving from the United States to Spain, I’ve adjusted to walking and taking public transport everywhere instead of driving. It was a natural transition, something that I think many of us long for. (I think it would be far more difficult to do the opposite: move from walking to driving everywhere). During this adjustment, I’ve realized that walking gives us humanity. It’s worth moving more slowly because you can see things from a human pace instead of highway speed. You’re forced to confront your fellow citizens eye to eye. When driving is the norm, human is lost because you only see people through your window, which creates a physical and metaphorical barrier between us and them.
When driving is the norm, human is lost because you only see people through your window, which creates a physical and metaphorical barrier between us and them.
In the US, everything from pedestrians to trash can be seen and immediately forgotten in our rush to move on, aided by our speedy machines. Indeed, our cars are merely mobile boxes and our American Dream houses are just other boxes that separate us from our neighbors. I realized that we live in a box, drive to work in a box, and return to our box at the end of the day. We like our boxes to be big, comfy, and to contain anything and everything that we want to keep us entertained and safe. Some of us want luxury everything so that we can feel like the modern-day kings and queens that we truly are. We even have access to the biggest box of them all: our corner of the World Wide Web. Ultimately, we want our box to protect us from the scary and ugly parts of the world that we’d rather ignore. It’s hard to blame us.
I won’t pretend that walking and taking public transport makes us one big happy family, but it does encourage us to lean on some powerful tools to preserve our sense of humanity in our shared world: our senses. Our senses help us perceive the world on a human scale and remind us of our human perspective. Seeing things from walking speed allows us to notice the details and people around us; hearing the sounds of people, the wind, or the sound of our breath reminds us we’re not alone; the changing smells help convey our changing position in space; and touching the ground through the physical act of walking uses our muscles and reminds us that we are lucky enough to be able to get around on our own two feet. All together, we are forced to confront—viscerally—the fact that we are part of something larger than ourselves.
Our senses help us perceive the world on a human scale and remind us of our human perspective.
While I can’t deny the sense of pure freedom of speeding down a highway at 70mph in the middle of beautiful, open country, I know that this kind of drive is the exception, not the rule for most Americans. When I lived in the US, I was used to the congested around-town driving and oftentimes terrifying freeway driving that made me feel constricted and stressed. In Spain, I can eliminate the stress and feel a similar sense of delicious autonomy when I can get where I want to go on foot or by bus. Cars can be convenient and in many places, a daily commute by car is the only option. At this point, I’m just lamenting the lack of public transportation and walkable cities in the US, so I’ll leave my thoughts here. Right now, I am grateful for my car-less commutes and am relishing in my humanity.
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