Those in silence want noise. Those in noise want silence. Peace makes a fool of those rooted in phenomena.
It is not the fastness of life that bothers me. It is the listless, maniacal infinitude of it all. Life, to us, is presented as a long string of moral palpitations and emotional highs, and we are now in the time of the semester when this narrative is manifested for many as a deep and difficult burnout. I, for one, am profoundly tired, and I often don’t know why.
The endless juggling of 18 units with jobs, with friends, with extra-curriculars — it was because of this that I started cycling. The steady circumrotational rhythm of spoke and wheel — the familiar jargon of clicks and beats — showed me what it means to exist.
Cycling is a meditation on pulse. Every leg pump is incense to the soul. It is contemplation without books or impassioned intellectual debate. It is the steady reckoning of a bicycle to an arched California coastline. It is art. It is rebellion. In a world that fetishizes a break from the rhythm, this constant cadential incense fights against normative values. But in the constants — silence, love, gravity, photosynthesis, light — in these there is transcendence.
The rhythm has no patience for the screams of tendons and ligaments. The silent tear of muscular fibers. Systematic regrowth. One more push is the necessary lie of head to limbs. Crystallized lightbeams caress the aluminum frame under the chlorofiltered tunnel of redwoods.
It was not cycling that saved me, but God and the peace that comes from transcendence and beauty. In a moment of profound exhaustion in Payson last week, I pulled out my old journal in an attempt to capture the peace of a 500- mile cycling trip amid the hectic flutterings of sleeplessness and stress.
I wrote the bulk of this column in a battered Moleskine last year while cycling through Big Sur — without a clue that somebody might read it. The distant echo of sea lions sounded furtive in the morning fog. It was there that my story began.
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Follow Nate Barton on Twitter: @TheNateBarton