Eddy Jackson MBE | Media Bot Maven

Zen and the Art of Cycling

For me, the joy of cycling is about the sense of moving, travelling, connecting, and interacting with the stimulating local ecosystem you are travelling through.

It is about new experiential stimulation, creating new perceptual insights and sensory awareness. Being alert and alive through this heightened awareness may lead to enchanting moments of ecstasy. These experiences constantly change as you progress through time and distance.

A new sense of well-being and peace, restfulness, and bliss evolves from the interaction of cycling through the physical landscape in all its glory.

Bike touring or bike packing is more than the components of bicycle parts, panniers, gear, and equipment that mindless pundits constantly bang on about.

Move on. Do not get bogged down by pundits’ pedantic, muddled thoughts and confused egotistic language.  Get on your bike. Embrace life by experiencing biking trips into nature and new environments…Zen and the Art of Cycling.

In the beginning

French onion sellers arrived every summer on black sit-up and beg cycles loaded with strings of onions when I was playing out on Southampton’s new post-war estates. Stereotypically, these mobile retailers wore black berets, had healthy bronzed skin, and racks on the front and back ladened with fresh Breton crops.

When visiting my birthplace at my grandfather’s bungalow on the Essex-Suffolk border as an infant, the village grocery store employed a plump assistant dressed in a white apron and on the grocery bike with a larger wicker basket sitting on the front rack laden with hams, cheeses, and vegetables to sell their produce.

Those were the days, my friend. When time crawled, I thought it would never end.

As I grew up, exploring the New Forest and the River Test’s countryside, I discovered incredible adventures, such as travelling miles on bikes, that we did not share with our parents. Freedom, open spaces, large skies, sunshine, and changing landscapes set the scene.

Then, the transition into the jobsworth constraints and inhibitions of work intervened for the next sixty years. Did an android take over my body and soul?

As a crusty, cantankerous, grumpy, bald old man who exists at the bottom of the pile on the edges of their community and is ignored by the larger society, salvation and redemption came through buying a second-hand Sonder gravel bike.

Wow! A revelation. Where had I been? What had I been doing? Life was ignited and started on the first ride. A transformation and metamorphosis changed my outlook, thoughts, lifestyle, and quality of life for the better.