Cycling
Wheel: iPhone
“Cycling can be lonely, but in a good way. It gives you a moment to breathe and think, and get away from what you're working on.”
(David Byrne)
Cycling is never about the bike.
It’s always about the road.
I found cycling as I recovered from burnout a couple of years ago. Long rides are now part of my weekly, if not daily, routine.
Cycling puts me back in my body and gives me time to think as I find my place in the world. I know that walking and running can both work in the same way but cycling better suits my sense of geography and the open spaces where I live.
As I’ve cycled, I’ve seen my landscape, with it’s particular views, vistas and sightlines, anew.
I’ve come to know it’s levels and become acutely aware of gradient. I know how it responds to weather and seasons, where water lies after the rain, where I can find sheltered routes and when to attempt exposed, windswept expanses. I’ve felt piercing cold, blazing heat and cursed battering winds. There have been days when I’ve stopped, breathless, aching, in recovery and others when I’ve paused to simply appreciate the awe and beauty of being alive.
Cycling has brought me back to my senses.
As our relationships to work, travel, health and community have shifted, it’s felt important to relocate myself. Time alone on the road is curative and, as I’ve re-familiarised myself with my local world, it’s form and structure, it’s rhythm and life, I’ve been able to reset my sense of self as well as place.
Theodore Roszak coined the term ecospychology as he spoke of how our connection to nature can improve interpersonal relationships and emotional wellbeing. In fact, the whole ecosystem benefits interconnectedness. Arne Næss asked us to consider the ‘ecological self’ which includes not only our sense of human family and community, but a broadening sense of self as we identify with all beings and the whole biosphere. As our relationship with the wider ‘ecological community’ grows we naturally begin to care for it and our restoration is mutual.
As I’ve cycled the the roads this year, I’ve seen deep floods, then watched the earth dry and crack in the heat, crops have struggled then failed and, as I find a place to stop for a coffee, I pull a mask from my pocket.
Cycling shows me that our world is changing and that I don’t have any answers.
But if they exist, I suspect I’ll find them on the road.
Notes:
Take a look at ‘Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind’, a collection of essays edited by Roszak (et al) exploring our wider relationship to and participation within the environment.
I’ve read Richard Mabey’s ‘Nature Cure’ several times. It feels like I could be ready for another immersion into his beautiful and intricate memoir.
This fabulous essay, ‘A Time of Fire and Smoke: What Story Are We Living’, by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, suggests that “maybe it is time to recognize that we are living in a different story, or in the space between stories, the boundaries broken, nature claiming back a landscape we have invaded and exploited.” Lee asks us to acknowledge ‘carbon neutral communities and locally grown food, restoring wetlands, and many other signs of a sustainable future’ as inspiring dreams, but that they “deny the darkness of our present time—authoritarian regimes, entrenched patterns of greed and exploitation—all the forces of resistance to real change.”
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