Juan Carlos Kreimer

Bike n Zen
Urban cyclism as meditation

Fragments
() We, intruders to the traffic of yesterday, are todays flocks, and soon we will be plague. Without talking to, and without touching each other, we multiply naturally, all by ourselves. Associations develop, biking events are organized in suburbia, bike lanes are created crossing towns from north to south and east to west, the number of public bikes and stations where to pick them and leave them increase, places to park them become established, some boroughs even financetheir purchase), and some province towns and counties organize all day biking events, thus reviving classical sites. There is an official acknowledgment of urban cyclism. This support is not due to a love for the bike: it is the only way to solve the dilemma of transportation.

.
() Until the appearance of mountain models, the urban cyclism

scene was ruled by a small elite of people who seemed to be allergic to enthusiasm, ironizes journalist and historian Jacquie Phelan. I dont know if it is as much so, but it is true that the use of bikes was getting out of the grownups orbit. As if it was something belonging to some other times. 800 million bicycles go around the Earth, most of them in China. If humans are about 7000 million, one in eight persons in the world rides one. () Just an instant of carelessness may (mean goodbye). But how to quit? What can replace it? Sports are something different. () Bikes comeback is not an isolated phenomena, neither it is because streets and avenues reached a point of saturation, it is part of a number of transformations that originate from becoming aware and consciousness? Suburbia is aware that the automobiles increase curve raises along with the making of new units, with all sort of benefits and problems this brings. Theirs is more a reaction than a creation. On the users side, it means using liberties still available, something that does not come from an order but from daring. () Meditating does not consist in sitting cross legged and hands facing upwards to reach a certain mental state: sitting is that state. The same way, sitting with legs downwards, moving them at the same time as the pedals, hands with a firm grip of the handlebar is in itself the bikes own mental state. As we incorporate it sensorially, the bike object becomes an extension of our body, one more limb. It comes to transmit us its state, whatever be needed moment after moment, and interprets the impulses reaching our brain through our points of support. We establish this dialogue practically since the very moment we learn how to ride. Just by instinct, without knowing how. As for Zen, riding is that dialogue.

 () I dont idealize. Im simply aware that crossing the city and surrounding neighborhoods has a different effect within ourselves than doing it by car or bus. You dont travel inside a little shoe box looking through the small holes, you are inside what happens, not just looking at it. Being present in those moments is related with the feeling of presence mentioned in Zen. Having the attention opened to everything that happens, looking at it without becoming attached, expanding the vision in what has been seen and the retina, is, for Zen, a complete mental presence. () In front of one of those little houses there is a flowerbed covered with flowers of an intense violet color. Maybe it is meaningless and not worth of more than momentary attention, and, its sense, in case it has any, is allowing the minds eye to jump out of its usual grooves. Rediscovering, refinding, reconciling, awakening. Awakening to what? To the awareness that whatever surrounds us is nothing but Being. () Neither the future ever happens. We can imagine it, put projects and expectations in it. But when it is just about to become the present, the now devours it and turns it, immediately, into past. We can have forethoughts, not to live in the future. We are right now. This foot pushes the pedal. These hands on the handlebar. This crazy mind that resists to let itself be carried by the experience of the two wheeled Zen We are this moment. This moment is all we have. As ungraspable as it may seem. () We pedal and the minutes pass by without our noticing it. It is the present moment what goes forward and moves along as if it were following the front wheel. Time and space are just the same. () The sort of balance that the bike demands from us is also dynamic, it changes in an imperceptible and continuous way. The posture

that I have now requires adjustment to whatever each single situation may need. It is impossible to keep balance getting hold of it as if it were a handrail. As in all practices, balance is a result of an inner how to, not of a why nor to an outer way we can adjust to. () On the bicycle, the body seems to loose weight and the mind seems to expand its consciousness.

It comes, it leaves once again, Something of that remains Underlying.

Perceiving the bike between the legs is as if it were an extension of That, makes me forget this body. Forget the process of analysis, forecast, and decision I must make second after second. Forget that there are two separate entities, one alive and the other one functional. Forget the five points of physical contact that join us. Forget that the wheels touch the asphalt. That there are infinite entities around me. Body, bike and road interfuse and my mind rests outside time, outside the lane, outside the body. If there is an I present it is that of experience. () If we pay attention to how we are breathing, we will notice that our consciousness moves more easily throughout the body and realizes in which movements were doing something forced up, or where we have some difficulty we usually overlook. If we keep our attention focused on the way we pedal, and start being aware and getting rid of inadequate muscular efforts, we will also become conscious of efforts in some other muscular systems (dont add a bit to moving the bike forward and are generated at the cost of our own body).

() The daily train, bus or car commuting weights, and makes you tired, but at the same time it is so much incorporated to the weight of the rest of life, that makes the bike option seem, that which happens a few yards away from our eyes, as something far away reserved for ETs. To that silent majority of those transported beeings, modern life seem to have stolen their path. It turned their travel into an in-between time which, were it possible, they would like to obviate. Urban cycling is not for everybody. There are elderly men and women, mothers with small children, the physically handicapped, people carrying packages, people that must make daily long travels from their homes to their jobs. And countless circumstances for which the bike, is simply of no use, or becomes an extra complication. Public transportation is for all those people who for one or other reason cannot use the bike. As for the rest, those who really could, there are still many the potentials. Lots of them. The vital energy takes our body and does the task without our noticing it. A flux of energy runs throughout our neurons and cells, without our intervention, and we cannot interfere with this. Once it is done and we become aware of this, we feel a blend of satisfaction, relief and emptiness. Free for something else. Available. The pleasure of having been the vehicle that made this action possible makes the body feel satisfied. It is not even necessary to be aware of this for it to happen. To this ritual in which all activity done from such a level of surrender, the Japanese call art. The art of calligraphy, the art of flower arrangement, the art of tea, the art of war, the martial arts. Art does not mean, as in the West, the idea of a work of art, literary, musical, painting, but in the sense of mastership. Activity done with mastership.

 () in the same freedom that a bike gives, there are also its dangers and ways to avoid them. We, urban cyclists, translate into our driving, styles and behavior all patterns underlying in our own minds. We see a leeway in between two stopped buses and we pass through it. We prefer to do one or more blocks wrong way, salmoning through two sides parking streets, where a car rarely passes by, than doing two more looking for the right one way street. At the corners we do to pedestrians the same that cars do to them: we do not yield. We take advantage of the gaps in regulations to break them. Lights, red reflecting stripes, helmet just for a one block ride whats that? Up to this day, becoming domesticated is hard for me: a part of me launches itself, almost before I can make a decision. It is not enough for me to just to know Im doing something incorrect so as not to do it. I come my own way, with a thrust, and if I can, I go ahead or pass through wherever I can, as a pedestrian. I only begin to change those ways when I dare to admit that not only they are supposedly hip or typical urban cyclist vices, and discover in them parallels to other behaviors and reactions that become implemented to me in everyday life. And that, in fact, build my personality. () Riding a bike makes people more polite, and forces them to become more responsible. Observing all the rules and regulations, those of the borough and those of common sense, align (each one of us) with a superior order and restores that energetic pattern wherever we go. In a certain sense it also protects us. Maybe a car driver who find us careful, of both our own and common spaces, will become aware and infected with our attitude. Or at least may look at us with a better gaze. () that inner smile that becomes visible in most urban cyclists has

a lot of that self liberation from oneself and from the past. Each instant lived on the bicycle, in spite of how repetitive its practice may seem, brings up to our consciousness the amazement the present moment has to offer. Always. That is the invisible experience: the direct one.

Illustration of streching chapter