Wild Cycling

The wild in the title does not refer to dodging in and out of traffic like a barracuda on crack, but rather opposing the conventional modes of what cycling has become in the bespectacled society, i.e not buying into the fashion apparatus, or the over-securitized one that sees people wearing hi-viz jackets and helmets at all times. As I've said before, these measures, though it may appear counter-intuitive, actually work against you and the planet that we seek to conjoin with. 

The commercial aspects of cycling have gone stratospheric, and I cringe at the clobber out there that does not just cost a fortune for what it is, but which freely advertises corporate brands for which you are not paid. As for helmets, they are just a big con, another turn of the screw that seeks to hermetically seal you behind stuff you do not need. 

Wild cycling, then, is questioning these conventions that serve to package cycling into just another commercial activity, and remembering really what cycling is all about. The 'wild' refers to the thinking behind cycling, not so much to the moving.

If this blog has been about anything, it has been about moving under your own steam, and flying with your own wings. And being responsible. The wheels are your wings. And this is your opportunity to soar and see, and respond. But the more wrapped up you are behind societal pressures, the more you buy into the lure of capitalism that seeks to dislocate and distance you from where you are. And if you don't know where you are, then you really are in trouble.

Yet, we live in a thoroughly domesticated and spoilt society. Globalization has urged us to disregard the local and the familiar in favour of the exotic and the far. We would sooner travel around Asia than our very own country, because of this removal. Cycling (as do most activities and lesiure pursuits) becomes a sport or a weekend activity to help us recover from the week. As such, it is decorated with the usual capitalist paraphernalia: clothing, accessories, gadgets and gizmos... that further remove us from where we are and exacerbate our growing dislocation.

The locomotive and the local are not separate. Wherever we move underneath our own steam, that place is local. It belongs to us as we belong  to it. There is a solidarity here, and a synergy, that reveals environment and organism to be one. We have not allowed our selves to be usurped by a machine that not only divests us of our own potential synergies with our environment, but which pollutes that environment with chemicals and noise, and a general overbearing menace writ large through the scars across our fine lands in the form of carraigeways and motorways.

I guess then this is the crucial difference between what I call wild cycling and the domesticated variety. Wild cycling will help you see cycling as a Way.... not just as a 'means'. The incorporation of cycling into the body at a fundamental level helps one to fly. With the bicycle, as with walking, the feet and one's own propulsion systems, are at the core of our efforts. This not only lessens our impact upon the earth but actually starts to entwine us within it. As impact becomes embrace, the earth and the self become one. Not so for those who have allowed their minds to be domesticated by conventions, and who readily seek out the car as the first port of call for all journeys.

If I have learned anything from 'Life' it is that the natural engine should take precedence over the mechanical engine, and that it is the path of most resistance that leads one to enlightenment.

The wild flower of the hills...