Richard | Kingsland
“I’m 52 years old. I’m a Pākehā New Zealander. I live in Kingsland in Auckland, still the South Island is home. I work at Auckland Council and, that’s about it. I want to live a lot more intentionally.
I aspire to stop having to work for a living, and be able to put my time and energy into what I really value, as opposed to what I do for a crust. I mean, I enjoy my job, but I’m quite, in a lot of ways quite privileged with the work I do, but it’s not really that satisfying, either.
I need time. Life is very busy, and time is my scarcest commodity. I want time for me; time to do the things I really value, not just the functions of life, the getting the food and doing the gardens, those sorts of things. I want to have time to do the things I really value.
Community means a lot to me, and I suppose I find in Auckland a lack of a sense of community. Auckland’s a very transitory place; people are very busy. In a lot of ways they don’t have a lot of time and energy for community, and I guess I don’t have a lot of time and energy for community either. I guess part of it’s scale. I think that the scale of Auckland and the difficulty in getting around works against community.
What I’d like to do is be more immersed in my community like I was before I moved to Auckland. That sort of sense of scale in terms of knowing what’s going on, of having lots of connections with people, and I don’t see that in a big city. I see that very easy to achieve in a smaller community. Take time and be kinder with one another.
I have communities in what I do outside of my work, in terms of a group I volunteer with. I guess there’s also a community in terms of the people I work with, but in terms of community of place, I don’t really have that.
What I really value is environmental restoration. So, I spend my weekends planting trees, and I’d really like to do that fulltime, but I can’t see anyone paying me fulltime to do that. I’d just love to be planting trees all the time.”
