There are a number of things that, for different reasons, I
cannot think about while riding a bike. Many people say they are able to think
more clearly, reason more deeply, find better solutions, have better ideas,
when they’re walking, running or riding. I find it difficult, because I don’t
use the bike as an aid to specific thought. One of the pleasures of walking or
cycling is to allow the mind to react as it wishes to what it experiences,
without forcing it into any particular path. For this and other reasons, I
cannot think about the following:
Storylines-
In summer I spend most of the morning walking or cycling
around the lakes, the hills, the villages, and it would be great if I could
plan the writing I was working on during these walks, and then in the afternoon
I could just write down what I had already created in my head. It would be a
very efficient way of writing, but my mind will not do it. I could force it,
perhaps, but then I would enjoy neither the riding nor the writing, and they
are both, for me, pleasure, not duty.
At times my mind will produce stories as I ride,
spontaneously creating characters and finding worlds for them to live in and
events for them to experience and satisfying coherent climaxes for those events
to reach. And I nod to myself as I recognise the merit of what my mind has
produced and then after lunch I try to write the story down and it’s like the
stories you sometimes write in dreams, where you can’t wait to get up and jot
down the outline of the epic that has been formed within your sleeping brain.
And there is nothing there. You realize it was just colourful, dramatic,
incoherent nonsense, party streamers floating on the wind, entangling
everything they touch, including you, but meaning nothing. Dalí might possibly
have painted it, but not even Coleridge could have written it.
So I do not compose stories as I ride.
Women-
The seat of a bicycle is an oddly sexless place. I am still
young enough and male enough that the first thing I notice about an attractive
woman is the fact that she is attractive. But when riding a bike I am more
likely to notice whether her handbag matches her shoes. Perhaps all the
testosterone is being used to keep the wheels turning.
People who are wrong-
In this context I simply mean people who don’t agree with me
about something, or who don’t understand things I think they should understand,
and is a purely subjective category into which most people of whose existence I
have ever become aware could be placed at one time or another. It includes most
politicians, journalists, quite a few of my friends and family, random people
on the internet, in bars, government offices and shops. You get the idea. Most
of the time it doesn’t matter. You read or hear something you know or believe
to be wrong and most of the time you shrug your shoulders. Possibly you indulge
in a moment of exasperation, or you mentally form the bones of a rebuttal, but
then you dismiss it from your mind. (Either that or you write a blog post about
it). After all, every time I open my mouth, someone is sure to mentally place
me in their own version of that category. The freedom to be wrong is one of the
great privileges.
But once I get on the bike, if a memory of someone who is
wrong gets into my head I have to squash it immediately. I can’t just dismiss
it, I have to actively replace with something about kittens or winning the
Ashes or the colours of the landscape. Otherwise it can cause my shoulders to
tighten uncomfortably and my grip to the handlebars to lock so hard that I can
no longer control the bike properly. Perhaps that testosterone again.
So I cannot mentally correct the perceived errors of my
fellow man from the saddle. Which is no great loss to either of us, I am happy
to say.
The space elevator-
Work-
I never use the bike to actually go anywhere. I don’t take
it to work, I don’t pay visits on it, I don’t run errands on it. It is very
strictly for pleasure. And it is so much associated in my mind with enjoyment
and relaxation that it is impossible to care about anything other than the
beauty of the countryside and not getting hit by a lorry. I cannot think about
work, or worry about any problem that might have arisen, because real life
ceases to exist once I start pedalling. Which is one of the reasons I enjoy it
and do so much of it.
Oddly enough, one of the things I can think about while
cycling is the things I can’t think about while cycling, so the other morning as I
laboured along the paths through the hills I mentally composed this post.
2 comments:
Interesting in itself and also to compare with my own experience - of walking, not cycling, I've long given up the latter. When walking I take a voice recorder, so one thing I don't have to do is remember anything I've thought about. And the dangers of walking are less than those of cycling. The worst hazard is probably to be hit by a cyclist silently overtaking me on the sidewalk. I don't know how they dare pass within two inches, when I might erratically move to one side. The only consolation is that they would suffer more. I say that not from vindictiveness but consideration of the risk assessment that they must necessarily undertake.
There is certainly a difference between going somewhere and just going for pleasure. If I walk for a particular purpose, my thoughts might be tethered to that purpose, but if I just go, I'm thinking of nothing. As Nature abhors a vacuum, the Muse of imaginative ideas takes possession of an empty cranium as a squatter to an empty house. Result - my blog posts.
But an alter ego wants to live in Holland, Volendam perhaps, and ride one of those Dutch bikes, where you sit up straight on the saddle and proceed majestically.
I would find a recorder extremely distracting, but a lot of people seem to listen to music or the radio, which I also find distracting and unnecessary. Sometimes I find I can build some kind of coherent argument or complete narrative in my head, and reproduce it when I get back, but it's never deliberate. My mind just wanders here and there and most of what passes through it is lost. As it mostly deserves to be, my Muse being more likely to convert my cranium into a crack den inhabited by paranoid schizophrenics rather than the orderly and uplifting commune that yours seems able to create.
Mrs Hickory now rides a customized bike which looks very much like the ones maiden ladies rode to evensong in the 1950's (or so I understand). The reason is precisely so that she can up perfectly straight and just rest her hands on the handlebars, without requiring her hands, arms or shoulders to do any work. (Bit of disc trouble).
Don't imagine, by the way, that I am the kind of cyclist universally abhorred by English pedestrians. I am considerate to others whenever I ride near them and I ride purely because I enjoy it. I do not try to project an aura of supreme importance as though by making slightly ridiculous movements while mounted on garish metal tubes I am somehow saving the world.
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