Convenience comes at a price.
Last week, I was filling up my car at the gas station and was annoyed when the receipt didn’t print out…I was going to have to put on my mask and walk over there to get it. And then I caught myself in a familiar story: that these machines should work as promised and my time is valuable blah, blah, blah. And I realized I’m caught in a story line that is part and parcel of a) convenience culture and b) likely to turn us into marshmallows who can’t move.
Our bodies were designed to move. They function best when they are moved regularly and in diverse ways. Biomechanist and writer, Katy Bowman, argues that movement should be viewed as a form of nutrition, and that exercise (i.e. allotting an hour a day to move) is not enough in a world where we’ve edited out almost all other natural movement.
Our ancestors moved all day, but now we’ve invented myriad ways to eliminate spontaneous movement from our lives: stand-mixers, remote controls, home robots/assistants, pre-packaged foods and drive-through banks.Where we used to use rakes and brooms now we have leaf-blowers. So now, instead of enjoying the sounds, sights and smells of those fallen leaves we can blast them with a loud, pollution-generating machine that takes almost as long but requires virtually no bending, twisting or arm movement. And all of this supposedly because our time is so precious…We can have a sense of being rushed all the time, but what are we actually rushing to? Back home to watch Netflix? Or back to our screens to spend hours on social media or doom-scrolling on our newsfeeds? We’ve lost touch with the natural world and the less we move, the less we CAN move. I certainly appreciate that many of us work crazy hours and have long commutes, so may feel that there simply isn’t time to move more, but taking the stairs instead of the escalator, or parking a little further from the store is possible even within the busiest of schedules.
Convenience is also driving a lot of pollution. I was shocked to see that Walmart now sells pre-sliced celery and carrots wrapped in plastic individual servings wrapped in plastic again. That plastic will sit in landfill for hundreds of years (optimistic to hope that it stays in the landfill and doesn’t end up in the water or food chain). All to save the less-than-five-minutes it takes to wash and cut up some celery.
But we don’t have to do this. We can catch how the story is operating unconsciously inside us and we can build the movement back into our lives. On an individual level, we can walk more, cut out the unnecessary screen time, buy real (i.e. not-processed) food, and do more things manually…within the limitations our bodies give us. And as a culture we can rethink the way we design and build. Walkable, bike-able neighborhoods, as opposed to sprawling subdivisions miles from grocery stores and transit, would give us all healthier lives…but it requires a shift in our attitudes and expectations.
As long as you have relatively healthy joints, when you walk every day, you start to enjoy walking. When you ride a bike regularly, it ceases to be an effort and becomes a mode of play. You reconnect with the natural world, your stamina increases, and your mood improves. I love doing yoga, and it provides a multitude of unusual and novel movement vitamins, but alone, it’s not enough. That’s why I’m a huge advocate of swimming, walking or running, cycling, gardening and any other daily activities that will get you out of your chair and out to play with others. As the old chestnut goes, “Use it or lose it.”
Do check out Katy Bowman. She’s got a lot of really interesting work online and a number of books worth reading.
Here’s to more movement,
E
