For all our love of the bicycle, it is but a tool. We’ve heard from cycling advocates, green activists, and city planners how the lowly bicycle is the most efficient method of multiplying energy, of moving through the world that humanity has yet devised. We may nod, but in our bones we know that misses the point. We love the bicycle not because it is efficient but because it makes us efficient. We see the world; we flow through it like water down a river and we move, yes, we move like birds happily tethered to the earth, as if being still is a theft of freedom.
Sure, we love the bike. We love how it looks, we love its mechanical precision, its effortless elan, but for all its beauty those features are nothing more than our romantic projection of the ride itself, a way to look at an object and be reminded of the enjoyment that riding gives us.
That doesn’t change the fact that the bicycle is a tool. Oh, but what a tool. It’s a fun delivery device. It is the refinement of human motion, the distillation of effort and the magnifier of ambition.
It’s fair to ask, though, what that tool allows us to accomplish. An axe is meant to cut down a tree, a shovel to dig a hole. The bicycle is a way to focus on process. A way to discover elegance within muscle, an elegance we may find during no other hour of the day. A way to do and do and do, until the self goes quiet. It’s a way to discover our innermost thoughts. No matter what our beliefs, we are, each of us, Zen monks and each pedal stroke is a tiny meditation, a search for our truest self.
