To Bike is to be Beautiful
I heard somewhere that a certain order of medieval nuns believed their souls moved at a slower speed than their bodies. When I take a long flight or drive for over an hour, this certainly feels intuitively true. It feels like some part of me gets smeared across the asphalt, like my soul leaves buzzing light trails along my route. So, I do my best to move slowly through the world by walking or biking whenever I can. I mostly end up biking because I am terribly impatient, and I have places to be. Inevitably, breakfast lasts a little too long, and I end up jumping on my bike and sweating my way up one of the steep hills leading to BYU campus.
The thing that is particularly exciting about a bicycle is that it gets you going much faster than you could ever run, but all in the exhilarating open air. You're not seeing the world through the narrow picture frame of a plane, train, or car window. You're not plagued by the uncertain tremor of a motor engine. You must see and hear every single thing that is going on around you. The borders that once confined you are nowhere in sight because now you are in and among the moving image of life, no longer a mere spectator.
Once I was speeding down Center Street, and a pedestrian, concerned for his safety, sang (I'm not sure why), "Hey, I'm walking!" I sang back in a similar cadence, "I know, that's why I'm stopping!" He laughed, a surprised grin on his face—he was grateful that, unlike cars, bikes bare their passengers to the world, a world where one can sing back. There was a car next to me that also stopped for him. But when a car stops for a pedestrian or a biker, it is no joyous exchange. It is a weary shared acknowledgement of a narrowly missed catastrophe, a body sprawled over a crumpled hood.
On a more superficial note, riding my bike always makes me feel beautiful. Over the past year some of my friends and I have resolved to get good at jetting around the wide streets of Provo on our bikes without using our hands. One of my greatest pleasures is blasting down 800 East with my arms across my chest, a slouched back, bobbing my head in the wind. It is very cool. I also love riding around town with my friends in a loose gaggle. We bike to the 7-Eleven or the Maverik, legs pumping hard in the sun. We ride two or three abreast, chatting and laughing and screaming. This is a beautiful thing, to be a terror on a bike, to make the cars slow down to consider you, a flailing star of limbs seated on a jumble of rubber and metal.
Bikes are fun but, crucially, not at all trivial. As objects crowd our modern lives, the ubiquitous can become invisible, but we must resist, we must remember, as poet David Whyte reminds us, that “alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.” A bike, for me, is not just one thing among many. It is the thing, the thing that came into the world as a revelation and as an answer to all the prayers I lob into heavens: to be fast, to go far, to be beautiful, to be together, to disrupt, to be a bright little package of sweating body and glittering soul tied with tight knot and thrown into a world that demands to be seen!