Numb vs. Alive : Cycling as part of the National Curriculum

 Don't move, don't talk out of time, don't think, don't worry, everything's just fine... U2 Numb

There have been arguments in the recent overhaul of the national curriculum in favour of introducing Bikeability for schoolchildren (5-14) so that by the age of fourteen, children have an essential life skill at hand as well as the habit of daily exercise.

Cycling, one could argue, is already part of the curriculum insofar as the word 'curriculum' derives from the Latin word to run. This, as wayfaring and moving under your own steam, as opposed to being transported, is as vital as it gets, but judging from the looks and ideas of our nation, vitality is not at the top of the list, so much as making money, being busy, and actively conforming to existing social and economic conventions. Conventions that emphasise the importance of cars, technology and machines to dull your state of aliveness into one of numbness. Indeed, numbness as a deprivation of motion and feeling - an absence of vitality - appears to be the ruling order under which one labours in the modern workaday world; civilization being the art of looking away and of ignoring the degrees of separation that connect you and your spurious actions to the conflicts and crises that rage around the world on any given day.

Cycling not only helps to counteract this numbness, but it opens the self up to the practice of making one's own way through the world without too much dictation from others. Cycling sharpens the wits, the wits being a large part of one's overall intelligence and responsiveness; cycling also improves one's ability to respond, thus enhancing one's sense of responsibility. It builds confidence, enables assertiveness, engages peripheral vision like no other activity I know of; cycling enriches one's sense of space, and concordingly one's sense of time to the point where space and time, relieved of their stasis, become verbs. Life is a verb after all, is it not?

Cycling helps one to see, to really see, not just with the eyes but with the whole enactive and engaged body. In a nation that is slowly succumbing to the mechanization and technologization of the human, being able to move across the land under your own steam, and at your own pace, cannot be underestimated for its power to open one's eyes to the deeper underlying realities that enfold you. 

Moreover, in purely physical terms, cycling speaks for itself as a way of reigniting the body's own internal engines, engines that are perfectly natural, that do not pollute and instigate wars, and that bring being back into its original fabric of aliveness.

The difference could not be more simple. Engendering a culture of cycling at an early age is a matter of allowing a certain 'free-range' quality amongst the future generation, a quality that will pay dividends in terms of aliveness not just for people but for the planet as a whole. By contrast, by not including cycling as part of the curriculum, and by tacitly encouraging our children to drive and engage in a self-destructing techno-culture (where car and computer are kings), we are preparing our selves for a future just like our present - full of conflict, crisis and confusion. All this will slowly evaporate however with the clarity that comes from a vitally engaged body-mind.