Con-Touring

It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them. Thus you remember them as they actually are, while in a motor car only a high hill impresses you, and you have no such accurate remembrance of country you have driven through as you gain by riding a bicycle. 

Ernest Hemingway

  
The ‘with’ is not just a mode of being-in-the-world, but our transcendental condition.

Jean-Luc Nancy, From the Existence of Communism to the Community of Existence.

The word 'Contour' I have discovered is as much a verb is it is a noun, since at a deeper level of reality, and as Jean-Luc Nancy eloquently makes out, we are all fundamentally 'with'. When you're out and about, cycling-walking-energizing, this soon becomes clear, but when you're sealed behind screen and speed, or sedentariness, it doesn't.

This kind of exploratory cycling is more than just cycling. There is a transcendental aspect to it that reveals itself to us in those quieter moments of encounter, or when we simply pause to rest and take in the view. It's not just the contours of the land that become more 'felt' and 'integrated' (and thus more memorable), but the contours of Heart & Mind too. Through the simple (and yet apparently paradoxical act) of 'getting out into it', the beyond can be realised within.

These cycling trips and rural excursions thus present us with an opportunity for gradual dissolution and enlightenment, and an opportunity to get to know the world (to re-cognize 'world') which at that deepest stratum of reality (so deep that there is no reality) is at one and the same time our very self.