The real daredevil, the real daring heretic, is the hero-human-being who chooses his own way, who devises his own route, through the landscape called life.
The daredevil questions and investigates from the outset societal conventions and ways of being not so much in the world but with the world. In the words of one such courageous and daring Scot, Dugald Semple, (who appears to have been largely forgotten in these times of excess and entertainment), it is necessary to conform little and reform much. Or in the words of his trans-Atlantic predecessor Henry Thoreau, to confront the essential facts of life.
Cycling is part of this reform, part of this essential fronting process - with Body, with Mind, with Nature, that can reconnect us to our greater selves. Start with this. The rest will soon follow.
The daredevil dares to not work at the behest of a system that is predicated upon profit, upon the exploitation and destructuring of our fellow beings and the land that shelters us. The daredevil dares to use his own engines, his brain, his heart, to reach the origin. He dares to become an outsider, to become egregiously autonomous, whilst leaving the comfort and security (and the oblivion) of the herd. He understands that lonelinless is a construct devised by men to explain their ignorance of the aliveness of the world. He dares, this daredevil, to have faith in his higher self, this self that man has outsourced and sought to call ‘God’.
The daredevil dares to cycle, to flow and flourish, and to radiate outwards. He dares to re-insert his self back into his environment from which he has been unnaturlly wrenched.
He dares to know, not through some spurious scientific enterprise, but, conscientiously, through the body, through the mind, through the heart.
The daredevil dares to belong, and, beyond the familial and familiar, question the deeper essence of ‘Family’, for our relations and relatives do not suddenly stop with our own kind.
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