S400: Slow Down; Get Honest

We have sacrificed both space and time for speed of movement. We have bestowed upon speed an unearned, inherent value. But the trade-off for speed has gone shockingly unnoticed. Climate change, obesity, disease, malnourishment, traffic fatalities, environmental destruction, international conflict, stress and mental disorder, resources depletion and water quality aside, the glaring misstep here is the absence of the factual, truer human form.

We have a world constructed to be read and experienced only at high speeds. A complete world where we, as honest beings in simple pure form, cannot interact. We cannot understand our space, read our signs, access our structures, visit our families, complete our duties, or eat our food without a vehicle of high speeds. We have businesses that will not serve us as beings. Drive-ups, drive-ins, drive-thrus. Any typical office or shopping center will require you to traverse yards of desolate, vacant space to reach a front door. And more than our businesses and social spaces: our homes. We have made our homes fronted by huge holds for vehicles. We must scamper around to the side or up a flight of stairs in hopes of addressing this space, let alone hoping to enter. We move as people on the margin. We occupy the space next to roads. We have signals to tell us, as humans, when we can occupy our pubic right-of-way, and when we need to stay on the side. We must ask permission of a machine hand to enter our space.

In our speed, we travel as if transported. We enter our cars, or even our trains, and leave the world behind for a bland, artificial environment. We pass through communities, landscapes, people, destinations, sights, sounds, smells, experiences, and take little or no notice. When we reach our destination, we emerge hopefully without having to encounter the world before entering the structure of our travel intention.

The mindlessness with which this behavior takes place, and even has become commonplace, is baffling, if not straight shameful. We have turned our backs to the world, to new experiences, to the simple, easy, obvious, essential education of life. How can we call a place home if we don’t experience it, engage it, interact with it? Why would we move through a space without interest in it?

Pedestrianism provides full and complete access to the world. It is how we experience, how we learn and grow, make decisions and consider situations. This is time gained, not lost, through slow movement through space.

Speed is a function time and space. But why sacrifice our space and our time to it? Why sacrifice your honest self? A sincere encounter with ourselves and our space and time. Slow down.

 

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Weston Brinkley is a pedestrian and resident of Pioneer Square.