This past July Kendall and I got rid of our car. We had been thinking about doing it for about a year. It began around the time we decided to move to Seattle. One of the many reasons this move has been so good for us is because it has given us the opportunity to start from scratch in so many ways. We are getting to decide what we want our life to look like and make decisions based on that.

Part of the reason we wanted to live a car-free life (besides the obvious environmental reasons) is because we are in the process of creating a life that reflects our values and part of that means that our regular life is not one that we dread coming home to after a vacation. We want to have a life that we don’t constantly feel the need to have a break from. Giving away our car is part of our commitment to slow down and to live a sustainable life. That means living within our means–financially, environmentally, and overall within the energy that we have instead of daily moving deeper into debt. It’s too hard to live under increasing debt of any kind and to us it is just not worth it.

So, when the lease on our car was up we turned in the key and walked home. Now we walk, bus, and occasionally use a flexcar. We live within our community. We run less errands. Consume less. Spend more time outside. Decide if something we want is worth the energy output to get it. Most of the time we end up making do with what we have and are really glad we did so.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 13th, 2007 at 10:46 am and is filed under Environment, General, making changes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.