We Live in the Natural World

I Ride My Bicycle to Ride My Bicycle

Bicycling is a reflection of simplicity, sufficiency, equanimity and completeness. When I ride my bicycle, I am at peace with the Universe, at one with the Natural World. I hear birds and the breeze in the trees,the soft sussuration of waves on the beach. I feel the wind in my hair, sun on my skin. I see the shadow of my wheels preceding and following me. I am centered on my bicycle.

When I ride my bicycle, I supply the energy to move it forward. I feel the pavement under the wheels, I move and shift on the corners, keeping my balance and willing my bicycle to move in the direction I require. I change gears to match the slope of my route. With my feet on the pedals, I maintain control of my speed and with my fingers on the brake handles, one for each wheel, I control my slowing down and stopping. I am constantly in touch with the physical world around me, untrammeled by a glass and steel shell.

When I ride my bicycle, I am traveling, not being traveled.

Bicycles are agents of decentralization and degrowth. They are simple, relatively inexpensive and easy to maintain. They demand fewer resources than cars, trains and airplanes, for construction, use and maintenance. They require no energy infrastructure to power their use, only sufficient nutrients to power the biological engine perched on the saddle.

Bicycles can be an essential component of a local distributive transportation system, in combination with buses. One can ride one’s bicycle to local destinations, and/or put the bicycle on a rack on a bus for longer distance travel, to be retrieved for the “last mile” to one’s destination. Trains only travel where there are rails. Automobiles require acres of paved roads and parking facilities. Bicycles can be brought indoors, hung from the ceiling as elegant decoration, parked unobtrusively nearby, or safely locked by the hundreds in a space that would park only a dozen cars.

Bicycles are the perfect form of transportation for a bioregional society. Bicycling reduces dependency on regulatory bureaucracy and encourages self-sufficiency and awareness of the Natural World in which we all live.

“It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them. Thus, you remember them as they actually are, while in a motor car only a high hill impresses you, and you have no such accurate remembrance of country you have driven through as you gain by riding a bicycle.”
— Ernest Hemingway