Road Closed?

 'Crow Road - Closed?  Aye, right!'

A big red ‘Road Closed’ sign impedes the way. Apparently there’s been a landslide. From time to time, even the land moves at a pace we can recognise. I carry on up the road not so much ignoring the sign as amusing at it. When you walk with your own two feet or use a bicycle, (when you traverse this earth under your own steam and not outsource it to some lugubrious, over-sized machine), you quickly realise there is no such thing as a ‘road closed’ - indeed the concept of closed roads and closed-ness quickly becomes absurd. You find that you are open to everything, that nothing is ‘closed’, not the roads, not the hills, not the skies or the coast, nor the myriad forms that inhabit it all. Everything is emphatically open, and connected.

In this way, cycling is as much metaphorical and metaphysical as it is literal. One creates one's own path without being dictated to by rigid legislations. Car drivers, on the other hand, are so hooked in to the system of outsourcing that they have no idea whether they're coming or going. My father once told me (possibly the only words of wisdom that ever exited his mouth) that buying a car means connecting yourself to a system that constantly bleeds you dry (he was talking financially, via insurance, road tax, MOT, parking, fuel...) but he might as well have been talking psycho-physically. Following my own stints of working in countries like Libya, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia (countries not generally recognized for their road-safety records or bicycles) I understood not just the financial dangers of owning a car but the very real (meta-) physical ones too.

There are no 'dead ends' on a bicycle, no bottoms-of-bags (culs-de-sac) that you find yourself in, that dictate to you where you can and cannot go. There is a freedom to cycling that you could never ever get from a car, not in a million years. In all my years of cycling, (yes, I may have had to throw the bike on my back for crossing a stream or hiking over a hill), I've never had to stop and turn around because of a way that is closed. When you follow the way of the cycle, the cyclical way of bodying forth under your own steam, the word 'closed' never enters the equation. As the old Zen saying goes: the obstacle is the path. There is always a way forward.... (on a bicycle)...