Flow-er

We are human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human.

David Abrams, Spell of the Sensuous

If everyone cycled everywhere instead of being driven, the world’s problems - existential, economic, ecologic - though they might not be solved overnight could nevertheless be solved very quickly through the simple act of inducting one’s self into a fundamental solidarity not just with one’s own kind, but with all living creatures, the elements, and the planets.

It is this change in how we move (doing it ourselves as opposed to having it done for us) that ostensibly effects a change in our day to day state of consciousness, our perspective, and by extension, our world-self outlook. The car is an indictment of a civilization that is no longer civil at a distance, and only civil on the surface. It is an indictment on an economy that is not economic, and a human that is no longer human but approaching the demented robotic.

David Abrams once wrote that we are only human in our co-sanguinity with other creatures. The movement of the blood is all important here. This is the triumph of the cyclist: his ability to flow fully under his own steam in spite of the sirenic wailing of the automobile. The cyclist realises (as does the walker) that the automobile is the autonomous individual who is mobile of his own accord, and not some machine that carries him often at great cost to his self and to the environment he inhabits. This tin machine like some dastardly pesticide sprayed by politicians and social conventions kills the flower within us, or at the very least diminishes its natural blossoming.

It is thus that the cyclist, in this open-flowing state, and in this metanoia of mind inculcated by such a state of being with the world, becomes ‘flower’ and begins to flourish.