Scooter Snoop » Blog Archive » A Scooter Life - A Slow Life

Scooter Snoop » Blog Archive » A Scooter Life - A Slow Life

Heavens! So many cool folks out there blogging about the simple joys a scooter can open you up to. Sometimes they wax downright philosophical.

Scott, who scoots "down-under," meditates on how a scooter can slow you down, get you where you are going, while still retaining the pleasure of the journey. It's a long piece for a blog post, but it barely touches the ironies of speed and slowness as a scooter rider comes to know them. And I don't mean that to be nearly as dismissive as it sounds. Scott explores one aspect of the issue quite well, and plants an intellectual seed that leaves a scooterist pondering how big an issue their relationship with speed really is.

In his fantastic book “In Praise of Slowness“, Carl Honore believes that we are living on the edge of exhaustion. He says our pace of life is spinning out of control & that most of us live in an accelerated culture of our own creation. Honore recommends we consider the facts—we spend 40% less time with our children than we did in 1960s; the average American spends 72 minutes every day behind the wheel of a car, & that adults across the west currently devote a meager half hour per week to making love. If we’re honest, most of us are caught in the same vortex. Honore says, these days the whole world is time sick. In a survey of five thousand UK workers, 60% said they would not be using their full vacation entitlement in 2003. In Japan they even have a word for ‘death by overwork’—karoshi. In 2001 the Japanese government officially reported 143 karoshi victims.

For me, my time on the scooter is play. It doesn't matter if I'm commuting, running errands, or just exploring new back roads. When my scoot is sick, even if all the logistics of my commute are resolved, I'm still operating at higher stress levels. Getting to work, getting things done, without the scoot, IS work. With the scoot, no matter how tedious my wage slavery, I'm reminded for a half hour, an hour, everyday that I'm free. That's what "cagers" don't understand. You drive a car because you HAVE to. You ride a scoot because you can.