Once upon a time, I was in a game where the things we write are weighed via the electron scales of ruthless review. Every word was the subject of judicial consideration and the things that got written would be relatively robust to the scrutiny of the hordes with an axe to grind. No wonder we all descended down to the game of polishing and refinement and the total avoidance of saying anything new.

That’s not how I want this discussion to go. Consider this to be the blitz of a Harley’s exhaust proceeding up the solemn isles of a congregation intent on following the disappearing sounds of a meditative bell. That’s my ‘User Agreement’ to preface what I’ve got to say. This is not designed to be an epistle to the status quo.

OK, now I can proceed. I want to address the question: why can’t the bicycle take over the transportive role of the car? Why can’t the bicycle be king?

See what I mean? No one poses a question like that. Even the most zealous bicycling advocates extend only to the rights to share but a tiny bit of the road; to have our existence formally noted, politely, like recognition for some kind of disability group. There’s no advocacy to eradicate the car from the landscape. That’s taken to be a silly, worthless and pointless suggestion. So they focus around the margins of incremental change. Change tinkering out on the spiral arm of the furthest void of the fringes to which our society extends. ‘Let’s prepare a patch way out there where we are granted the right do our thing’. Like former slaves requesting a corner of the municipal waste dump to set up our humpies.

No. I like posing outrageous propositions that stimulate screaming hissy fits of derision. I specialise in that… The risk, of course, is that you loose your audience (and your job) as though they slammed their receiver on the crank call they automatically assume your argument to be. That’s fine, I say. Those who ride the mainstream of the status quo are in too deep to contribute anything intelligent anymore. That’s my proposition: ignore those defenders of the status quo; let them sink.

Back to my theme. Why can’t the bicycle be king?

We all know the facts and the arguments. Bicycles cost a fraction of a car to buy and run. Bicycles cost nothing to park, are usually quicker to ride to work, avoid traffic snarls, keep their riders away from pill-pushing quacks, reduce road rage, eliminate pollution, require a fraction of the public infrastructure cars need to run. And so the argument goes on (and on), (and on again). No, bikes are not a replacement for trucks, or for carting your powerboat to the pollution of your local lake. Yes, it’s hard (but most definitely not beyond the reach) to cart a family’s weekly shopping take of 25 cartons of PepsiCoke lolly blubber water and 12 dozen trans-fat pizza’s back home. So take five trips by bike instead and lose the Coke.

But does that stop anyone from riding most of the time? No, it most definitely does not.

Here’s an unassailable fact. Cycling is vastly more efficient than carting your bloaty bulbous bots around in a car. Bikes are more reliable than cars. Bikes cost virtually nothing to use. Bikes are good for the environment and for you. Bikes can often get you faster to where you want to go (if you factor in the detritus of parking, un-parking and fuelling a car). Bikes are, emphatically, better!

Here’s some even more amazing facts. Bicycles are higher tech, more refined, better made statements of transportation science (or art) than any, and I do mean any, car could ever approach. Bicycles are not some kind of crude agricultural device of value only to hippies, weirdoes, lycra poseurs and the dispossessed. Bikes can accommodate these groups’ needs, for sure (consider the trendy ‘fixie’ brigade). Bikes can be for ma, pop, grandad, grandma, and the little sprouts. Even teenagers…(if only we could afix bicycle wheels to the sides of their beds…). Isn’t it just fascinating that in our current era of Economics Mk. III that where the car companies are collapsing like the economic credentials of Robert Mugabe and Milton Friedman, the bicycle companies are thriving! We were only half joking when some of us suggested that Specialized should buy out GM. If you are looking for economically and technically efficient production systems, don’t look a the car industry; look to the production of bicycles. I’d stack my Pinarello Prince up against any Ferrari or Mercedes for state-of-the art! And I’d put any Giant hybrid supermarket bike ahead of anything from GM or Ford.

No, the argument against what I suggest is merely a screech from the bog of mindset-fixed blot bots refusing the concept of difference. ‘We can’t do that because… because … because we can’t! Go away’. Well, folk of the mind set bog, have I got something to suggest! Your closed minds have created the tidal wave of global warming and generic environmental decay that’s going to slap your besotted faces from the Burger-and-fries coma to which you have succumbed. Time to wake up, people. Get a bike. Ride the renaissance of the world!

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“National Recall for Unsafe Dummies“. A headline to really capture the imagination! ‘Thousands of babies dummies have failed safety tests and are expected to be recalled nationally…’ the lead-in explained.

I mean to say… think about it. This bit of national newspaper editorial referred to the plastic dummies (known as pacifiers in the USA I believe) some local distributor was diverting to their un-discerning customers here in Australia. These el-cheapo Chinese plastic baby plugs have, it was determined, the capacity to fall apart (fancy that for stuff made in the ‘World’s Workshop’ of the Peoples’ Republic of unbreakable China). By falling apart, they might cause distress to the babies into whose mouths these things had been inserted by parents seeking legal relief from their screaming offspring.

OK, fair enough I suppose. But, that’s not what caught my attention here. My attention diverted to the cause of recalling unsafe dummies of a more generic kind. I know some dummies out there that pose a vastly greater threat to the peoples’ health than these Chinese plastic baby plugs. And these dummies I’m thinking of did, once, pass someone’s safety tests.

I am, of course, referring to that permanent centrepiece of my own personal death-related anxieties: car drivers. Think upon this. If any product you could pick off a shelf could possibly come even close to the unmitigated dangerousness of the average car driver, these goods would be cordoned off by SWAT-Teams, defused by remote robots, and put on a space ship targeted for disintegration in the general direction of the Sun. Dangerous dummies indeed.

Think upon all the fuss over that great fizzer of Swine Flue. How many died? Couple of hundred? Around the world, thousands die every single day via assassination inflicted by dummies driving cars. And you don’t see the folk panicking into paroxysms of mask-wearing paranoia every time they spy another person driving a car.

The unreality distortion fields most of us wear when it comes to our generic acceptance of the terrorism of cars is one of the world’s truly great feats of mass-psychosis. Accepting car drivers in our midst is like some nutter’s predilection to use a nuclear weapon in his house to rid the place of ants.

Think about it from the viewpoint of a visitor from, say, the enlightened Planet of Bicyclism. You are from the utopia of a cycling culture and are suddenly confronted with the fixations of Homo sapiens with cars. These bozos are all propelling themselves around at a hundred kilometres or so per hour with control asserted via the grip of frequently enfeebled hands rack-and-pinion tuned to the mental distraction of minds utterly pre-disposed to distractions of any kind - right into oncoming lanes defined by the safety barrier of a strip of paint.

Think about it. Consider those nationally recalled dummies again. Think about the threat to the poor babies’ lives as they suck on their Chinese plastic plugs while strapped into the seats of a car hurtling down the road on the wings of a collage of bolts, some of which might be loose at any point in time, under the control of parents whose competencies to control their vehicle at best resembles the capacity of a surfer to outrun a tsumami – and they are worried about the safety of the dummy shoved into the mouths of their kids?!

That’s the real dummy to be recalled. The dummies who cower at the ephemeral terrors of the world while blinkered to the accumulative holocaust cancer of cars. Yes, I truly wish we could recall dummies like that.

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Imagine, if you can, the sensation of visiting an Earthly city from a more advanced off-world civilisation where cycling prevails. Your culture is one where journeys are an adventure to be enjoyed; where the folk live to ride and ride to live, all blended into a whole of splendid harmony.

But as you come in to land on this strange, strange land, you are about as disappointed as an Earth-bound tourist off to visit the ancient lane ways of Paris or Seville… The place of interest is surrounded by a cordon-blight of what appears to be concrete industrial estate. Acres and acres of car parks; and every street is cess’d with the detritus of the peoples’ parked cars. On every otherwise picturesque leafy street, they’ve blighted their world with their ugly piles of mobile tin. The grand historical lane ways, boulevards and parades are encrusted with cars like an eye rimmed by the seepage of chronic conjunctivitis. The aesthetic assault is profound. People invest a lifetime of toil to build homes and communities as a statement of their artistic, landscaped vision. Then they blight and soil the result with the detritus of their cars… Worse, they invite these metallic monstrosities into their homes! Contemplate the modern homebuilder who devotes 25 per cent of her roof space to the housing of a car; more, perhaps, than they would provide to shelter their kids. Why would anyone want such a stinky ugly thing under the same roof as themselves?

Our off-world visitor would, by now, be wondering if this might be some strange cargo cult religious thing. Like the freeway of cattle on an Indian street. Do these people worship their cars? Do their cars demand rights of obedience that inflict an aesthetic, environmental assault as testimony to their disciples’ strength of faith? As these cars slime and otherwise blight the landscapes they despoil with the impunity of the tin gods they surely must be, surely mankind worships these things?

Then our visitor would notice something curious; something hopeful and something of a telltale of possibilities to come. They’d notice that a few, only a few, but a few nonetheless reject the hegemony of the autocratic, sacrifice-demanding car. They ride a bicycle! Or progress by their feet.

These wonderful folk travel with pleasure instead of engorged rage. Their parking rituals are light-of-touch indeed. They leave no residues of oiled-fumed slime. They power their travels with the honest, self-contained efforts of their muscles instead of the ecology-raping pillage of toxic oil. Surely, given the parlous state of the planet they all share, these cyclists must be the enlightened ones. They certainly look the part; pedaling away the ugly obesity-tainted physical flatulence that the car drivers wear like some sort of uniform of servitude to their gods of tin.

***

There’s a theory I like from the annals of complexity theory. It goes something like this: the world is a complex place. Only the omniscient know all there is to know about how things work. Omniscience is the delusion of those who aspire to be monstrously overpaid corporate gods, academics and the drug-plumbers of the medical profession. The world does not work like a clock. Command and control is like driving a ship with blinkers on. We can pretend, but the hidden surprises and mysterious depths of systems we can never completely understand always get in the way of the grand delusions of the managerialist machine. To manage a complex system is to manage with our eyes wide open, not wired shut.

The enlightened game to play is the game of levers. Find a likely lever, pull it and see what happens. The game is to find the best, most strategic levers to pull. Big outcomes might come from the smallest nudge. Cleverness pays the biggest rewards.

I have a theory about the best lever to pull in relation to fixing the linked problems of global warming, physical obesity and urban decay. I have a theory about how to redress the uglification of our landscapes through the slime trailing blight of the automobile. The lever I’ve found would reduce rage on the roads. The lever I’ve found would redress the physical decay of those who avoid the attractions of exercise. The lever I’ve found would restore the majesty of our more illustrious landscapes. The lever I’ve found would reduce the gassing of our planet and the warming of the globe.

It’s an astonishingly lateral lever! A simple lever. A free lever to pull! A lever that would double the living space within our cities; extend the area for growing crops, extend the space where our kids can play. This lever will engage through a holocaust of short term howling rage. But sanity will eventually prevail; the folk will eventually calm; like the sea after a cyclonic storm. This lever will take gumption to pull. But it will deliver the goods; guaranteed.

The lever I recommend is to cancel all car parking.

Dig up the car parks. Ban the parking of cars on the side of roads. Force those who drive to park way away on landfills. Restore our urban places to the access of feet, rail and pedals. Reinvent a culture of trains. Free our homes from the hijacking terrorism of cars. Turn our garages to romper rooms for kids, or home studies from which so many of us could now choose to work. I am not advocating the banning of cars; just the rationalisation of where we put them when not in use. People can still drive to town. But they must be prepared to walk the final mile or so. Or ride a bicycle. Or take a tram, train or cycle powered rickshaw. Or even a moving footway if they insist. But ban parking in the streets. And ban those hideous, monstrous concrete parking lots visitors can see from space… Now that would really be something! A world where cars are relegated downwards from the throne of enthrallment to which they have for so very long been raised.

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OK, I admit it at last. I tried to work it all out just by wading in. I tried to just learn the programme by running the machine. But I still don’t understand what’s going on. It’s time for the manual. I need to read some instructions. I need a ‘dummies guide’. I need a ‘Dummies Guide to Understanding People’.

I need that chapter wherein it might be explained just why it is that folk persist in thoroughly self-destructive behaviour and then proceed to whinge and whine about the miseries of their lot as though those miseries are the outcome of someone else’s plot.

Take fat people (take them somewhere else… please!). Consider their total obsessive compulsion to whinge and whine about the miseries of being overweight. Consider the number of times they proclaim an intent to loose weight; but never do. Consider their self-obsessive diatribes on the low self-esteem they feel through being fat. Consider how they carry on as though their issues are the outcome of some kind of disease unjustifiably, unaccountably contagioned through someone else’s fat virus misdemeanours. Consider their incessant talk about visiting the gym. About how they did ten minutes on the treadmill, five doing push-ups and so on and on; as they wobble and waddle without visible result.

Consider the litany of diets, self-obsessive harangues on the evils of this bit of food over that. Pledges to cut down. Which translates only to reconfiguration of the daily five Coke’s to diet Coke instead.

Exercise? An intent to go to the gym. Purchase a membership. Post it on the wall. Feel better now? Back to the couch. Exercise? That’s in someone else’s world. And besides all that walking from the couch to the Coke machine…that’s exercise isn’t it? Next step. Buy a pedometer to count the number of steps. One step, two, five, 1,000…10,000 steps a day back and forth between the fridge, the Coke machine, and the TV. Ten thousand steps! Feeling like Olympic gold! Ten thousand steps, one at a time, resting pulse plus one. Remember the heart…

Oh! the heart… The sciatica, the sore back, tendonitis? Lumbago. Shortness of breath. Flat feet? Sore feet. Sore everything. Prickly heat! We need to stay indoors to avoid swine flue…to avoid catching maladies undefined. Waddle out to the car, drive five km to the local shop. Buy some chips. Some McDonald’s. Return to the TV. Watch some sport! Now you are talking. Cheer, clap, get involved. This sporting life - sporting hero! Heroic feats, all performed with no feet at all; chips perched on your medicine ball of fat. Need a rest after that.

Look in the mirror. Image out of joint with the fantasies of the mind? Mirrors distort. All our family has big bones…THIS is normal. Back to my chips. Schedule yet another visit to the local quacks. Going to the doctor…that’s engagement with health! Pills, more pills… SPEND on pills, buy some health.

I’m looking for the chapter in my Dummies Guide to locate the mental re-boot. Surely if people can self-elect to a life of sloth, they can reset to a life of heath. Where is the reset button? The human brain is something of a biological computer I am told. So - where’s the reset?

I want the chapter in my Dummies Guide to explain how it is that folk can walk around, through, past and over the bight fluorescent pink elephant in the room; like a ghost they simply cannot see. It’s right there! See! How can they miss this thing? This health giving, live preserving, planet restoring solution to every single issue of concern. It’s a machine of escape. A fat peeling, health giving, community building instrument of freedom. The cell door is open. The instrument of escape is sitting right there. What’s the problem!!! What do I have to do? Get on that bicycle and live! RESET Ride and Live; Live and Ride. Cycling Mind. Better mind. Right mind. Get out there and Ride! Get out there and Live!!

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Some things are universal. A universal mindset that recommends the motorcar as a replacement for our legs, a universal mindset that medical doctors ‘know best’, that qualifications are a fool-proof measure of intelligence, that we really do need to earn $300k plus a year to be happy, that football is an entertaining pursuit for the post-Neanderthal generations…

I have another one. This is for those already on the inside of the cycling promised land. That it’s always a struggle to find time for riding. Get together with any group of fellow-bicyclists and you will hear the complaint: ‘I need to ride more but never seem to get the time’. How often do you hear non-professional cyclists complaining about ‘too much’ riding? It’s always ‘never enough’.

I love to watch the games we play under the direction - if not dictatorship - of the mental models of our minds. Watching your own mental models is a bit like watching yourself from a mirror. It’s hard to see past the reflection of the vision we self-project. Remember Arnie Schwarzenegger in Total Recall? That’s the one where our hero took a holiday from himself to become a spy to unravel the intrigues of subterranean Mars. That’s what taking on a different mental model is like: taking a holiday from yourself.

So if the person you are insists that you never get time for a ride, why not take a holiday from yourself and become someone who does make time? Perhaps in that other parallel universe the reasons you currently cite for accumulating frustration instead of miles might simply cease to exist. Putting it all another way: are you SURE you can’t find the time to ride? Or is that your inner-dictator mental model trying to strangle your fun?

Now the universal first response to questions such as these is this: ‘I don’t have a mental model’ and ‘what you say simply does not apply to me’. That’s basically the same logic we might use to claim that ‘global warming is caused by everyone else but me’; that it’s always them, the other folk out there, who do bad things. ‘My issues that prevent me from riding are real’. ‘I can’t possibly change the way things are’. Sieg Heil!

Here’s how I did a coup on my own inner Fascist-In-Charge.

Work and cycling, were, for me, different spaces within my mind. Work was work and riding was something I did for fun. Work is not fun and fun stays at home… I didn’t ride to work. The commute was 60km (about 40 miles). 60 km in a car seems like such a long way. 60km by bike is… Hey! wait a minute. I do 100km rides on weekends and that is OK. I did 250km rides in my serious training days… I CAN ride 60km. But not to work. Why not? Because… See what I mean by mental models? So I rode. Once. It was a bit like going off to Mars. This was cycling of a different, new, kind. I did it again. I did it for a week. I did it for two weeks. Then it became routine. My mental model admitted a new culture of riding to work as a normal thing to do. Then, in that new world, I had the occasion to drive to work. Now that felt wrong. Bad. Ugly. The essence of giving in. Defeat. Never again…

The key point is that to transcend one mental model to the other will indeed seem like a change of life. But, and there’s the thing. You DO get used to life on the other side. And life on that other side can actually be far better! I suspect that all the excuses we make to stick with the models of life we currently lead is to do with our fear of the unknown; a fear of leaving the familiarities of life as it is currently lived. A bit like heading off in a boat when we all used to believe the world was flat; and fringed by this dirty great waterfall…

So I made time to ride through riding to work. But that’s not all. No, not even by half.

The ‘V’ shaped channel of my life had excluded time before 7am. ‘Ha!’ I hear you say… ‘I knew that was coming.’ You are now reacting just like the old me. ‘You’re not going to recommend rising at dawn…to ride - are you?’ That’s not for me! Not according to the mental model that tells me life starts each day at 8. You’ve seen them out on the road when the exigencies of work demand an early flight or that early early trip by car. Flashing-lighted cyclists riding the tragedy of their fate in the cold misery of dawn. The tragedy you attribute is the attribution of your dawn-excluding mental model. To see things in any other light is to take another trip up the hill of the mental model range that blinkers all our minds. You can’t see life on the other side until you climb that range. Climbing is so very hard; the hardest thing that many of us will ever do. I am not going to disguise that fact. But once you stand on top of Great Dividing Range of your mind, the views can reveal a life to be lived that you might never have imagined could be yours to have!. Those dawn rides are, simply, magic. Tragic are they who perceive what it is you do as a tragedy of being out of bed.

That’s two mental model shifts I’ve taken to shift from a casual tinkerer with cycling to become a real life-cycling cyclist for real. The shifts were hard; the excuses were palpably real. But as any mountain climber will tell, once you make the climb, life is never the same again. That’s how we can all make time for cycling. By re-inventing the lives we live to live a life of a more active, fulfilling, environmentally resilient kind.

Postscript

Speaking of changes… I am sure you won’t mind me giving my new ‘other’ blog a plug. Some of you were readers of my environmental blog: EnviroBlog. I discontinued that blog yesterday after two years of regular posts. I have decided to consolidate all my interests more completely via a new web space that I’ve modestly named rodericgill.com. Attached to that site is my brand new blog called PhotoEssays. PhotoEssays is the second generation of EnviroBlog. It’s a place to combine my environmental ponderings with my passion for environmentally-focused photo image making. I’d be more than curious to hear what you think! There’s already a couple of posts there to read (the latest is an essay on how religion appears to profoundly un-religious types such as me…)

Naturally, Bicyclism.net and this bicyclism blog remain unchanged. Like Enviroblog before it, PhotoEssays is to be my ‘other’ blog.

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These days, my travels by air are few and far between. So it’s been a while.

As for most people, I have a few core fears when committing myself to a flying tube. Crashing, of course. But also contracting the multiple contagions transmitted through the recirculated air in the airless wastes at 20,000 feet. I also fear being stuck next to talkers, zealous defenders of first class personal space in the confines of the cattle class cabin, and screaming aerophobics…

But the biggest fear is being stuck next to a human blimp. You know the ones. You see them in the waiting lounge. Folk who have vastly outgrown and given up on any hope of normal size. The morbidly obese. You see these folk and wonder … what if she/he gets the seat next to me? The visions that cross our minds are less than pleasant. The prospect is like facing a single loaded chamber in a 250 otherwise empty chambered gun. Play the roulette and that one-in-250 chance could be at your side for the next 18 hours! Pushing her/his stomach off your already cramped tray table…, being compressed into half your own seat space or less. All hope of a cabin walk to stretch the legs or attend to other more urgent matters; lost. Held captive. Just like them.

Now of course if I were politically corrected into a more humanitarian mode, I’d be talking about empathy with their sad plight, sorrow for their suffering, concern for their critically compromised health. But we misanthropes can be as surely and uncharitable as we like! If I were politically corrected into a more sociable character of empathy and feeling, I would feel for people like that. Curiously, considering my predilection to extend the warmth of humanity only to fellow cyclists and scant bemusement to all the rest, I do indeed feel a torrid feeling of genuine unselfish concern for the lady who has just corked herself into the aisle seat beside me. As her astonishing girth waterfalled over the now entirely redundant armrest that would otherwise separate our proximity, my very first concern was for the pure, unmitigated tragedy of her circumstance.

She struggled for a long time with the seat belt extension strap the militantly unhelpful Qantas flight attendants had provided. It was too short. She could simply not fit into the chair provided. The seat in front had wedged her into a position somewhere midway between standing and seated. But like an overinflated airbag being crushed into a too small suit case, she eventually compressed herself down into a hard core press fitted posture of extraordinary discomfort and, surely, abject humiliation. Like a keystone in a gothic arch, she would not be movable without assistance; without something akin to a crow bar and corkscrew combined.

As a too-thin cyclist, I had space to crush myself up against the window and still be able to accommodate the necessities of breathing. No, I was not considering my own plight. So I watched in horror her efforts to extract a book to read, her efforts to simply shift position, the utter impossibility to lower the tray table at feeding time. The impossibility to attend to the call of nature, should that call arise (and naturally, my own trapped incapacity to attend to matters of that kind). I watched in even greater horror as the ever unhelpful Qantas staff simply dumped her food on the outer hull of her rounded personal fuselage… I watched in horror as she absently crowded the entire contents of her meal (croissants, chocolates, hamburger; all) into her mouth in the time it took me to suggest the impossibility of my own compliance with tray table extraction to the unconcerned, uncaring, prosthetically smiling Qantas steward.

What makes a person like this give in so profoundly to a fatalistic acceptance of her current plight? How did she get like this? How could she possibly surrender to such an abjectly dysfunctional state?

Now my doctorate is in ecological economics, not medicine, so I can’t make an informed judgement on the biological or psychological preconditions for her state. But I am utterly sure that self-help is a pathway towards at least some degree of repair. Her mind needs to be blasted from the defeatism that has taken such a profound hold. Surely, she cannot possibly be comfortable with her current status. Surely she would like to be thin. So how is her mind keeping such a dysfunctional hold over any and all the possibilities for escape? What is it about the mind that can smash us so profoundly into such an abjectly helpless, self-crippled state? I simply cannot understand defeatism of this kind.

I know something that this woman doesn’t. I know the experience, the reality, of loosing weight. Two years ago, after 20 years of too little cycling, I weighted 104 kg (231 lbs). While that’s nothing to the 200+ kg that my neighbour must weigh, I dropped 32 of those kilos in 6 months of blissful, enthusiastic, soul-saving cycling. I remember my motivation to start that journey. It was a comment from my wife on a five day wilderness walk. I was complaining about the weight of my pack. My pack weighted 20kg. ‘Do you know’, she said, ‘that your pack weighs less than the spare fat you are carrying around?’ I felt that pack on my shoulders. Now I felt the weight of too much fat. I took to the bike like a dehydrated desert survivor to a water trough. One kg. Two kg. Five. Ten. 20. 30! Gone. I am alive again. Free. There was no diet. No regimen of pain. No militaristic martialing by personal trainers or gymn instructors. Just the pleasure of pedalling and pedalling again. Day in day out, every day. The more I rode the better it got and the better it got the more I wanted to ride. Life affirming, life confirming. The ecstasy of fitness. The ecstasy of reborn bodily flexibility and the capacity to participate in any physical adventure I choose.

These are the rewards to such a simple commitment. There was no medical intervention, no food detox retreats. No gut clamping, liposuction, diet quackery. No real expense (other than in a bicycle that paid for itself in saved commuting costs within only a single year). Yes, it was a real world, genuine, no-compromise win-win and win again. I know the joy that release of this kind can bring. I am thinking how this lady beside me would feel from taking a similar path. What sort of transformation just a simple change in mental model could bring. How astounding a change she could self-invoke. And then I look at her with a sideways glance. How utterly tragic that she can’t know what I know. How unspeakably tragic are all those who give in to the traumas of the self-destructive mind. I want to shout at these people. Shake them out of their stupor; their torpor; their self-inflicted self-destruction. Stupid people. Impossibly blinkered people. What a gift, what a profound escape the bicycle can provide!

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There’s something deeply disturbing and ugly about consumerism. Even worse is consumerism with the intent to construct an image of one’s self for others to consume. Of course, the careful construction of an image of one’s self as we would hope others will see us is a universal human condition. It’s a preoccupation and it’s the first symptom of personal suffering. Its the first symptom that our delusions of self have taken hold.

That’s why there’s such a thriving business in plastic surgery for the aged and increasingly wrinkly. That’s why hair dye exists. That’s why people buy expensive cars when a geared-up, de-bladed ride-on lawn mower is probably all they need to waddle down to the local shops.

I’d been thinking, hoping, fantasising that cycling was an oasis of retreat from egotistical matters such as this. Cycling and its more sedentary counterpart of meditation sessions at a remote buddhist retreat (where the accoutrements of the meditative life are definitely NOT for sale), are the two great oases of retreat.

I’ve been keeping a weary eye out on my cycling attentions for all these years. I ride because I love the sensations of speed, the totality of control over the instrument of my progress and the fitness to ensue. I tell myself that I don’t ride to be seen as, fortunately perhaps, no one ever sees me ride. Except the local sheep, an eagle or two and the drivers of cars (and they never ever see cyclists of any sort). Why, then, is there this need to order a new S-Works Roubaix branded riding shirt? Don’t ask such difficult questions! Cynicism is evil…

I tell myself that my indulgences in different shades of carbon are an impersonal aesthetic thing. I struggle to maintain the fancies of my mind placing too much store on the fact that my new Specialized S-Works Roubaix was the bike Tom Boonen used to win Paris-Roubaix twice in a row! Pride in ownership is ownership of an ego heading out of control. The bike’s a thing and the thing is not me. After all, Big Tom could win Paris-Roubaix on a Trek Madone if he were deluded enough to so choose (!)

The story I tell myself is that I chose this bike because if it can withstand those roads, it can withstand ours. It’s fascinating to know how a bike such as that might ride under my own control. Why then do I have a full screen desktop image from Specialized on my computer screen to celebrate their second victory at Roubaix… Could it be that I am in need of some meditative regeneration of my desired desire-free state?

That amazingly outrageous sage, Chogyam Trumpa, once said that merely knowing that you are subject to the games our egos play is the first step to enlightenment. To be reflexive of such things is to be on guard; to be on the proper pathway of life. Which means that being reflexive, I can now hop on my 2009 S-Works Roubaix and ride past and past again the local road cycling clubhouse with an insufferable smug grin…

Oh how I am suffering as I dare to remind everyone I know how my bike won yet again…

Well done Tom Boonen and well done for the Specialized S-Works Roubaix!

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Tighe lives on the wall. It towers above his village and falls away below it. It is vast and unforgiving and it is everything they know. Life is hard on the wall, little more than a clinging on for dear life. And then, one day, Tighe falls off the world…

from On, by Adam Roberts

Have you ever read one of those stories that deliver an utterly unexpected, otherworldly ending? I refer to stories that construct a picture of character ambitions, dreams, anxieties and passions that are all revealed, through an utterly twisted ending, to be misplaced diversions when scaled against the reality finally revealed. I’ll give you some examples of stories such as these: Inverted World by Christopher Priest; The Fabulous Riverboat Series by Philip Jose Farmer and On, by Adam Roberts

The surprise ending comes through the revelation of incompatibly parallel contexts; the one that we assumed was real and the one revealed to be so. The context we assume that shapes the lives of the characters we observe or the life we lead ourselves is the framework of meaning that makes what we see and think seem real. Of course, these life shaping contexts shift with time and experience but that shift is evolutionary, or emergent; our context changes bit by bit. Even if the context becomes revolutionary, we still can track the history of that context shift. We can recall where we came from as a way of giving meaning to where we are now. Unlike the characters in the stories I mentioned above, we don’t usually discover that our life contexts are a total fraud.

Context wraps up the notion of objectivity. What we say is so, or should be so, is usually shaped by this background context. Many of us devote our entire lives to progressing along pathways that are valued or validated by the contexts we have constructed. The context tells us what is good and what is not; and how to measure how well we do and how bad things can get.

What if, though, we do live in a world where there are multiple contexts all twined together; some similar and some totally at odds. What if through one context what it is that you do is measured to be a success but through another would be regarded as abject failure? Scary huh?

Guess what? We do live in a world of multiple contexts that sometimes sharply diverge. That’s how come we can have sustained argument, disagreement, hatreds and war. And that’s how come a critic at iStockPhoto managed to reject a photo I recently submitted when it was a winner to me. I understand that his context is his and mine is mine; and that to him, mine is wrong and his is right. I also understand that his context is that one that stopped me selling that picture…

It’s at this point when one person’s context is asserted over others that I get riled. Much worse, though, is when those who would assert their own contexts reject the existence of any others. That’s context fundamentalism. This says that my belief system (context) is right and yours is wrong because yours is not mine and mine is all there is. Much much worse is when those who would assert context fundamentalism do so in a position of empowerment. That’s called the privileging of positions. Privileging via empowerment to judge or to be privileged via access to a gun.

That’s why the world’s gone to pot. That’s why my photo got rejected…

My plea is simple. We need to make people know a few simple things:

• Your context or world views are not the only ones possible
• You could be wrong (your context could be a fraud)
• I could be wrong (as you would maintain)
• We all could be wrong!
• When our disagreement is at the level of divergent context, we will never agree; and we are both right when right is defined by conformity with individual context.

I’ve had misery from this context thing for years; and so, I am sure, have you. Years and years of having research papers rejected by context blinkered funnel vision thinkers with an incapacity to see outside their personal cave. Years and years of battling moronic motorists whose context asserts their uncontested ownership of the road. Years and years and years of battling moronic context besotted motorists who contemplate complexities like roundabouts as the setting where only they have the right of way…

Years and years of hearing critics trash art that I think is both powerful and great. Literature, paintings, photography, music and ideas that send a quiver of shivers to my sensibilities are rubbished by those whose context of vision is not the same as mine. Why can’t we all just agree to the richness of discursive difference? There’s a huge power of enriched intellect and pleasure to be had by embracing difference; because in difference we can often find insight that could answer the problems that our prevailing certainties sustain.

My problem is that I sincerely do not believe in experts. In a world that is too complex to define definitive understandings, there is no one or no group of ones who can know all that there is to know about, really, anything at all. By the time we think we might know, the show moves on. Just looking causes the stream to diverge.

In a world without experts, or definitive uncontestable knowledge, there is no objective truth. Which means that truth is always subjective. Which means that what we think is true might not be true at all. We might all be living a cargo cult of delusion via attachment to a context that’s a dismal fit to everything that’s going on around us. Like the truth proposition that we need to live in an economy of perpetual growth. That money is a metric that matters. That personal value is tied to dollars. That personal value is tied to peer-referentially asserted pedigree (the experts’ plague).

I have a simple recommendation. If you are feeling committed to your own personal cause; if you are feeling nice and confident in your vision, if you believe that there are sages who really, really know, I recommend a simple but challenging tonic. Read Adam Robert’s book for a taste of what’s its like to transcend from one context to an utterly disconnected other. Once experienced, a crash-like context challenge is like cycling for the mind. Transformational and invigorating. Life changing and a thrill.

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I am looking for a sign!

We need a symbol to capture the essence of what’s needed to escape the bog wallow of pathologically greedy business, politicians with monotone vision, and the legions of couch potatoes duped to their unfulfilling state through the influence of reality TV.

We need to engage in a little creative destruction, to coin a term explored more fully in that most august of inspired blogs: enviroblog (sez me modestly; but I do wear a tie over my tee shirt when I write for that one…). We need a sign like a chair to be thrown through the window of the world that’s now gone wrong. Not a sign for gentle tinkering. Not even a sign for a revolution. We need a sign to help smash us into lateral mode. We need a sign that reminds us that our collective monitor needs serious recalibration. We’re all looking at the world through the violent indigo of a colour spectrum missing most of its ink.

Yes, dear reader, we need a sign that slicks our path onto a different chain ring of life. It’s got to be a sign that disorientates us all. It’s got to be a sign that confronts us all. It’s got to be a sign that somehow makes us feel encouraged and enthused. It needs to pick the best of what was to facilitate our journey to a better place. We need a sign that stops the folk and makes them think. It needs to be a symbol for where we need to be; rather than of where we are now.

So, what’s the challenge to be addressed; what’s the mess from which we should now depart? What’s in the bog from which we need to escape? The smelly stinky water in that odious place is an socio-economic system based on consumerist greed. Growth is good, greed is great. Mine everything and everyone so that we can stuff more chips down our gobs while glued to the mental debilitation of living only for cash. Gas the planet with our cars and worthless endeavour so that we can fashion compete with anorexics and balding pasty faced gits BMW’ing their way through the world’s resources to climb a pile festering to the manufactured-delusions of meaningless marketing drivel.

The challenge is to reinvent a world that opens all our eyes to an intelligence of sustainable living that is evident to every other species than ours. Birds know it. Bears know it. Beavers know it. Kangaroos do. Parrots do. We do not. Balance. Take no more than is needed; define life around what is and can be rather than by what its not.

We need a sign to illustrate a life full to the measure of what is feasible and reasonable rather than the transfat, wallowing boil of genetically engineered stupidity that counts for progress these days. We need a sign that captures the essence of the greatness and cleverness which humans can achieve. We need a sign that explains the limits or boundaries of expectations carefully crafted around cultural-economic-environmental balance. I have found a sign! Here it is. Click Here…

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Is Z Man delivering a koan for our collective enlightenment? This one is on my list of tweets of the year! It’s the grand master, sage-sitting-on-a-hilltop-meditating-for-20-years grand utterance of cryptically meaningful tweets. I’ll assume you know what a tweet is by now. If not Twitter on in to the place where tweets come from to explore the lay of a landscape too great to ignore anymore. Feel free to drop in on my own Twitter space and explore the sights from the porch of the room I’ve occupied there. It’s free and the next iBIG thing…

Anyway, I was discussing the metaphysics of Dave Zabriskie’s great tweet. Drill down to any depth and you will find more layers to explore. Professor Z’s 8 word doctoral thesis. More profound than many a learned 20,000 word/page forest-felling compendium of academic pontification.

It’s about mental models, world views or the zen of cycling mind. What you do here, tends to inform what you do over there. When we shift through the different scenes of daily life, we tend to carry the one light to illuminate every stop along the way. At least until we can find a switch through which to cast a more penetrating light. Dave Z was in racing mind. Dave Z was still in racing mind when he entered his car. Dave Z got booked for speeding. The light he was using to race his bike was an unsympathetic light to apply when driving a car. Speeding is his business and his fame. But that’s a fame of too narrow a light through which to illuminate the two journeys through which he sped that day. Fame and felony; two entirely different outcomes from doing essentially the same thing. The difference is, of course, the context. Just like you can’t use your library card to buy a new Pinarello, you can’t use your credit card to borrow a library book; even if the two cards seem to be the same under the feeble light of a single mental model spread too thin over too large a space.

But so it is that we all tend to shine the torch of a singular mental model to spaces which need lights of a different kind to see the things that make those spaces places that are not the same. Poor Dave Z. Why should he get fined for doing exactly what our political leaders are doing to us now? Like Dave Z, they’re shining the light of other times and other places to the spaces they now can’t see at all. Like a man stumbling in the dark once his candle is out, they are seeing things that are not there.

Airlines treat their customers as potential terrorists from the afterglow of terrorism now past. Politicians drip feed corporate chiefs with bail-out cash as recompense for deeds done that actually, in the new light only our leaders now fail to see, was the real terrorism with which they should have engaged. We all apply the mental model of plenty and infinitude to our choices that continue to trash a planet now past the tipping point of no return. Like Dave Z, we are doing what we do because we tend to fly in the sky without looking at the landscape through which we actually pass. Sooner or later, we will hit the hill we failed to see while day dreaming our world views of Neverland to the unamused countenance of Gaia enraged. Just like Dave Z, we all need more than one mental model with which to illuminate the journeys we take. Mental models are the one thing we dutifully ration when plenty really does apply.

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