Why I Ride
There is something pure about bicycles and bicycling.
To an avid bicyclist as myself, asking me why I ride is like asking me why I breathe. In fact, I don’t know why every able person doesn’t ride regularly. Whether it’s for transportation, recreation, or exercise, there’s a bicycle of the right design for just about everyone at an affordable price point. Even though I’m a purist and I pay for my miles in the currency of sweat, muscle pain, and lung-bursting effort, I don’t hold a grudge if people seek to reduce their labor and discomfort and choose to ride e-bikes. Whatever it takes to go outside and get moving -- go for it!
Bicycles have always been part of my life. There’s an old family movie of me riding my tricycle in my pajamas as a toddler – with a buzz haircut and red slippers, no less. I can be seen pedaling furiously in the backyard of our house, seemingly intent on try to achieve escape velocity. The picture below (isn’t that the dorkiest of collars?) is from that era.
Me on my tricycle in 1962.
Growing up, bicycles provided not only mobility and freedom of movement, but I think it was something more. Bicycles provided agency, the capacity to exert power and achieve an end.
The ends changed as I grew up. In my early teens, I earned my Boy Scouts Bicycling merit badge, which required completing a series of six 25-mile rides and one 50-miler. In my later-teens, that end was a trivial but empowering act of rebellion – making the 17-mile round-trip with friends to a head shop to buy rolling papers. Nowadays, that end is self-discovery as most of my rides frequently have therapeutic and meditative benefits (that is, when I’m not in full-blown suffering mode, such as this past week when the heat index was in the triple digits). When I ride the mind flows freely and lights up with neural connections that reward me with deep insights about matters that have been of concern. And sometimes it’s the opposite: I will get into a rhythm of motion and breath and discover the slow erasure of thoughts until the mind becomes silent, transforming into a clean, smooth vessel where the conscious and unconscious meld into one.
On a purely physical level, I enjoy the incontrovertible health benefits of spinning the cranks. My father of blessed memory was an exercise nut, and he hoped his foundational belief in the benefits of exercising (“it’s the endorphins!”) would rub off on me and my siblings. On Sundays at the beach club, he would make us do laps in the pool before eating lunch. For him, exercising was a risk mitigation strategy - - genetics did not bless our family (on both sides) with a top-notch cardiovascular system. Whether it was hitting the tennis courts, jogging, or working out at the gym, he engaged in what I saw was a proactive ritual to keep the angel of death at bay (and probably more effective than spitting on the ground and muttering “perish the thought” as his old-world mother would do if someone, say, should ever mention “heart attack”). And all that exercise helped – in the end, it was not his heart that failed him. Following his example, I ride as extensively as I do for longevity’s sake.
The bicycle itself is also a symbol of self-discovery, notably among Jungian psychotherapists. Analysts will tell you that dreams featuring bicycles – with its associations of self-directed forward movement -- refer to the process of individuation, a person’s journey towards wholeness. It is no surprise that in the years leading up to my cross-country trek, I had countless dreams featuring me riding a bike. I had been feeling stuck at work, enjoying the financial benefits of working for a large corporation, but deeply dissatisfied because I found little that provided me with a sense of meaning. I was looking to transcend the rut I seemed to have dug for myself. The moving meditation and the clarity of thought benefits of riding appeared to be nudging me towards something larger than myself, an act that would rekindle a spark and accelerate self-discovery – an antidote to that rut.
The two long bicycle treks I had taken with my friend David during and right after college were transformative, and I knew in my core that taking a cross-country adventure would be the medicine my soul desired. In fact, the trek was just what the doctor ordered. What I did not foresee, however, was that it helped to recreate an experience I thought I had lost.
When I was a child, I would occasionally experience the complete elimination of the subject-object gap. I have two distinct memories of this: When I was in fourth grade, sitting at my desk in a noisy classroom, I felt the sights and sounds coalesce into one noisy and buzzing whole. A few years later walking along an asphalt path in middle school on a bright day, the sun, grass, air, and sounds of the outdoors coalesced, and I was no longer an “I.” There was just simply Everything All Together. Was I seeing the true face of the Universe, in which separation was revealed as illusory?
Of course, these spontaneous experiences ceased as I got older. Maybe there’s something about the all-too rational mind of an adult that closes the neural pathways that would otherwise allow mind and body to merge. But one day on the trek, bathed in sunlight, everything started to hum and buzz, even the traffic. Subject and object fused into one incredible pulsing, vibrating sensation. “Whoa,” I said to myself afterwards, “riding the bike can make this happen again.”
Lifting the veil that divides subject and object is a gift. I can’t think of a better reason to ride.
