Whycycle?

I remember talking to my friend Benee about cycling, about what it represented to us. It was late at night, after a race and we were drunk, of course, on the cheap beer that we we always drink after a race. I said that for me it represented freedom, that it was the feeling of freedom for me. He told me that he had taken his bike down to watch the sky show on the Esplanade and he had cycled past the rows and rows of cars and he had ridden right up to the foreshore and watched the whole sky show, in all its wonderful glory and then, after the show, had ridden home, past all the people trudging slowly back their cars. And I had known what he meant. I’d gone down there in a car that night, I’d parked a long way away, because I’d had to, because that is how it has to work with the cars, and it was hot and we’d walked for half an hour through the afternoon heat to the Esplanade and the girls had complained because it was hot and the walk was long and then, on the way back I had carried my youngest daughter asleep in my arms. My eldest daughter had been tired too, I had wanted to carry her too, but of course I couldn’t, not over that distance. So I knew what he meant because I’d done the other thing and it is freedom, to ride in, past the parking frenzy, past the esky haulers, the drunk teenagers and their sozzled dramas, past the police and the paramedics and right into the heart of the crowd, right into the middle of where you want to be. It is freedom to turn around, after the last firework has blazed its spectacular path across your retina and jump on your bike and ride through the massed humanity in all its post celebratory glory and ride out through all that while we are trapped in the traffic and the confusion.

That is freedom.

And yes freedom, like that, is a form of individualism. You are not one of the herd, you are free to move when others are trapped, in this case specifically trapped, by their adherence to a cultural norm. But it is more also. The bicycle, with its peculiar reliance on human motivation brings far more than that, it extends your potential, it utilises what you are, physically to move you (and others) from A to B. That is a freedom too. It is a machine, like a car or a computer, a fridge or a factory. But it is a machine that exists on a very human scale and interacts with us on a very human level too. You place your faith and energy in its two wheels and it propels you forward to where you want to go. Of course the tyres may tear or the brakes may wear but essentially this machine will take you where you want to go quickly and efficiently. People used to cross the Nullabor using pedal power, they still do occasionally. Yes it is slow compared with the awesome speed of the motor car, and of course it is physically much harder work for its rider, but therein lies the secret. We are animals, physical shapes cut from the same cloth as all the other animals on this planet, what makes us different is not that we are not the same shape, but what we choose to do with it. And the bicycle is, for me, one of the purest lessons in what to do with who and what we are. It is a machine, a part of how we have changed both ourselves and this planet beyond all recognition, but it is the good part of that. It utilises our energy to propel us forward, to take us where we want to go. It is easy to cycle next to someone who is walking and converse, it is easy to stop and chat, to pause to check somebody is okay, to see if another person is in need of help, and yet it also allows us to move between places far quicker and with far less effort than we would without it. It requires infrastructure in much the same way a car does, roads facilitate ease of use and of course the parts are created using industrial methods. But it is not the same. It is not the same because of the scale of the endeavor, because of the scale of the obsession and because we are open to the world (and therefore more a part of it) rather than hidden away from it. It is easy to stop, to look around, to smell the air, to feel the sun on your back, to cool yourself in the wind. Freedom then becomes freedom not just of movement, or even of being an individual as opposed to part of some mass of humanity or other, it becomes freedom to relate to the world on human terms whilst still retaining some of the best and most positive aspects of industrialisation. And the best and most positive aspects of industrialisation are, of course, the best aspects of who and where we are right now.

So I cycle to work and it’s a fair ride and some days I take the train or the bus or some combination of bike and train, sometimes just to mix it up a little, sometimes because my bikes fucked, or I am, and sometimes I don’t ride because I just plain don’t want to. But when I do ride I love it, when I do ride it is like swimming in the ocean for me. It gives me perspective and allows me to move and think at the same time, which is where the best thinking gets done in my head. I am engaged in the journey physically and that is vital, it is as important as engaging with the world emotionally. If you can engage in a thing you gain an understanding that an intellectual analysis simply cannot give. It is hard, perhaps impossible to describe, but cycling is one of the things I use to help remind myself how important and how easy it is to do that, to interact with the world and to give yourself over to it. So why talk about this? Why talk about this feeling I have? Because I have a bad feeling the current trend seems to be an attempt to disengage as much as possible. Why go out there, amongst all those other people, when you can hide in your little bubble, play your Nintendo, drive your 4WD and plug your MP3 into all the moments in between. And before you say it I love all those things, I love all those things and more. I love the cars and the computers, the mobiles and the malls, I like eating burgers from fast food joints whilst yelling into my mobile phone whilst driving on the free way at 150. It is fun to drive yourself into that bubble, it is spectacular and consuming in the same way that it demands you to consume. I don’t think we need to strip it back to some kind of pre-industrial hell hole. I just think that we need to accept ourselves for what we really are, physical beings, who need physical interaction with world on every level. We need to make that work for us, we need to make sure that we interact with our environment on that basic level as well as others. In the industrialised west it can sometimes be easy to forget how good that can make us feel and that is what cycling reminds me, everyday. Oh and I reckon you feel like you’re going faster if you are on a bike at 50km than if you’re in a car at 150km.

This one is for Benee. Brisbane is lucky to have you my friend.