I lay on the floor in a puddle, moving as little as possible while the sweat dripped in my eyes. Temperatures were close to 50 degrees, and the humidity added to the oppressive nature of the beast that was India in the summer. When I went outside, I was choked by the heavy smog and pollution, which made it near impossible to breathe. Go figure, even in that heat, men pulled around bicycle rickshaws with passengers, still struggling to make their daily dollar.
Now flash forward 10 years to now, where in St. Paul last week, temperatures hovered around highs of +30 and you would have thought that the apocalypse was nigh, in some people’s minds. Oh the humanity!
At one point, I thought I’d have to tie my husband down in the potting shed with a bowlful of water, since it looked like he might have up and exploded in anger. People took refuge in basements to sleep, and one co-worker mentioned her husband made a sarcastic jibe about how they’d chosen not to put in air-conditioning when they built their house, saying, “Now if only there was some thing that made houses cool when it was hot outside.”
Edmonton suffered a series of rolling blackouts as temperatures and energy demand soared last week and five major power plants shut down. Conspiracy talk abounded, but really, talk of price-fixing made no sense; at the core of it, where does the money go if your power plant shuts down? It goes to the company that still offers power! Prices had skyrocketed even before the lights went out, with Capital Power noting it was hit with a double whammy, as it had to pay contractual penalties to clients for failing to produce power for them.
As the demand for energy proved insatiable, stores couldn’t keep air-conditioners in stock, and I heard the rallying cry more than once: “We need air-conditioning! Where is the air-conditioning?”
Globe and Mail columnist Margaret Wente wrote a column last week on the air conditioning quandary, writing that: “today, air conditioning is not regarded as a sign of progress. It is a sign of weakness. For many people, it poses a moral dilemma that’s right up there with eating meat or driving an SUV. Air conditioning makes global warming worse, which leads to more air conditioning, and so on . . . Righteous people say they can live without it, and you should too.”
But she argues, air-conditioning has become a matter of necessity – and it could save your marriage too! Thanks for the marital counseling, Wente, but only you would so succinctly make the point for not using air-conditioning and then argue that it’s stupid to go without it.
Our mindset, living in North America, is that we are entitled to live as luxuriously as we can afford (probably even more than we can afford). We don’t use enough energy in the winter, clearly, that we also need to spend energy in the summer to stay cool, even when it’s not half as hot here as it is in many other places, places where the heat can be a killer.
It’s a sand trap. Our desire for more things, for better things, can only end badly for us as a whole. What it means is that no matter what we have, we’re dissatisfied. If we buy a camper, maybe we’ll suffer buyer’s remorse because it doesn’t have air-conditioning or because it’s not large enough. If we buy a house, maybe after a year we want to move because it’s not big enough, or laid out the way we want. If we buy a canoe, maybe we’ll kick ourselves when it turns out to be too wide to fit properly on our vehicle and ends up sliding off on Lakeshore Drive when we go over a speed bump. (You can read between the lines as to where I got this example).
I can’t help thinking that very often, we need to stop and set back from the mindset that we “need” something, like an air-conditioner, to realize what we truly need can be stripped down to the bare essentials. I like my central heating as much as anyone in Canada, but I can’t and won’t fool myself into believing that it comes with no cost, that it is only a matter of flicking a switch. Nothing is that easy.
So this afternoon, I stretch out in the sun, as lazy and as comfortable as a cat. All I need at this moment is to soak up the peace and quiet, the still-breathable air, and really, the quite beautiful warmth and heat. Best of all, it doesn’t cost a thing.
