Another day another ride. It’s getting warmer so Eldest Son’s friend came along too, saving her mum a car journey.
Why don’t more people travel like this? It is a mystery to me.
People Powered
Living simply in an over-complicated world
Living simply in an over-complicated world
Another day another ride. It’s getting warmer so Eldest Son’s friend came along too, saving her mum a car journey.
Why don’t more people travel like this? It is a mystery to me.
2 comments
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April 29, 2011 at 8:32 pm
Accidental hermit
Look at how beautiful your bike is compared to the others. I wonder if that’s part of the reason you’re on a bike, and the others aren’t. We’ve become materialistic in the wrong way, and no longer know how find joy in good tools. Bicycling is all about taking care of your stuff, including yourself and everything around you.
May 1, 2011 at 9:37 pm
Andy in Germany
Thanks for the thoughtful comment.
I think you could be right. We seem to ‘consume’ things: we expect things to be dirt cheap, but not to last. We don’t look at the craftsmanship but the price or the ‘features’ in use things until they fall to bits whereupon we start the process again. And then we go to museums and pontificate that “Things aren’t what they used to be”.
Could it be that some things are “Like they used to be” but when we see them we just whine about the price? For example the Bakfiets is a great example of good craftsmanship. I was able to meet the people tho assembled it and talk through stuff with them, see the pride they had in their work, but the most common question I get about it is how much it cost. I tell people it costs less that six months of running a car.
On the other hand, a bicycle is a simple thing, and so much of crud we clutter our lives with is complex, like this computer which apparently is ‘old’. We can’t take care of so much stuff, so it becomes a problem, an expense, or a dead weight cluttering up the attic, then landfill fodder. Simple things we can repair ourselves, find joy in repairing, and which last are few and far between. It’s hardly surprising we don’t value things or enjoy them.
I seriously wonder of we’ve been trained to think this way so we just throw even simple things like bicycles away in the assumption we can’t fix them.