I'm a woefully inactive person these days. It just sort of happened over time. If you saw me on the street, you'd see a relatively slim, healthy-looking young man, so don't mistake me and think I'm some morbidly obese couch potato. I'm simply out of shape. I have a bit of a spare tire and I'm just softer in the middle than I used to be. This spring, I've been considering why that is. I enjoy being active, after all. It just seems so hard to do that sometimes.
I've been debating the house vs. apartment argument with myself lately. I know people who advocate either side, although the argument usually takes the form of owning or renting in those cases. I find the idea of renting a house a little strange, though, personally, and rife with possibilities for awkward or difficult relationships with your landlord. It just seems to carry greater risk than reward versus owning, where the primary risk is in the house's equity, but if you're not planning to flip it and you're confident in your choice, that's not really that big of a risk.
Anyway, I digress. I digress for a point, though. Today was a moderately nice day. Sunny and warm - low 60s - without feeling hot. The late winter/early spring chill remains on the wind, so even those warm temperatures can feel cooler than they are. It's more crisp out than it is balmy. So I had some windows open and outside sounded nice. But then always comes the problem - what to do outside? I'm a goal-oriented sort of person. I like to have something to do. I don't like feeling idle (ironically, this is why video games are appealing to me). I live in an apartment right now. A lovely apartment, actually. It has a private entrance with a deck (which is shared by two others) in a building of three floors. The area is quiet, for the most part. Tucked away and peaceful. It's nice.
But as soon as I step out, the problems to being goal-oriented outside begin. For one, the idea of driving to a park to shoot hoops by myself, or something like that, just seems silly. I want to be outside. Getting in my car is counterproductive to that. I could bike to a park. But then I've exerted myself enough, so I'd bike back. And some days, that's cool. But before I even go biking, I need to carry my bike down two sets of stairs on the outdoor deck. Not fun. And then I'm just aimlessly biking. And if it's windy out, well, that wind gets colder on a bike. I could go for a walk, but walks aren't exciting.
Which got me thinking. If I had a house, I'd have a basketball hoop. If I were at a house with a basketball hoop and wanted to spend 10-15 minutes outside, I'd go shoot hoops. Happily. This is a perfect, short-term outdoor activity to do by oneself. You can even pretend you're cool while doing it, like you're shooting for the game winner or something in the NBA Finals. You finish, go back inside. No time spent in transit, a goodly amount of exertion, and no other people required. Nice. If you have a partner, other options open up (then you might consider driving or biking to a park to play tennis, let's say).
But this didn't happen. I live in an apartment building with no hoops. My apartment complex doesn't actually have an outdoor play area for its tenants - this was an attractive option to my wife and I, since she works a night shift and we wanted a quiet environment. Some places do; they have tennis courts or basketball hoops. But those places tend to get a little more... raucous at times. Anyway, as I was thinking about this, it occurred to me how there's been a migration back to apartment living over the past few years, as the recession took hold. It's hard to get out and be active if you don't have your own space to do it in. I grew up in a house, playing in a yard, and by virtue of that, we just had fun outdoor stuff around to augment that experience. Apartment-dwellers, I feel, don't often. It's not like they can just grab the bat and the glove and go to the park, on average. They don't have a yard, so they might never have bought anything like that.
Sure, some people manage anyway. My mother and stepfather are avid cyclists, despite living in an apartment. To their credit, though, they have a garage through their apartment where they keep a lot of outdoorsy stuff. And besides that, they're exceptionally outdoorsy people, a group I'd consider an outlier in this discussion. I'm thinking of the average apartment-dweller. Does the average apartment-dweller have a bike? A basketball? Know where the nearby parks are? It just seems, in an apartment, that the outdoors - and the means by which to have fun outdoors - is a step further away than it would be otherwise.
Guess I'll find out when I become a homeowner someday.
No comments:
Post a Comment