A Pedal to Enlightenment

A Pedal to Enlightenment

It began on the way to Santa Cruz. The wind had been blowing in my face all the way down the Cabrillo Highway and I had seriously underestimated the mileage from Sausalito. I had planned this trip so methodically as well - I had a specific route, with a certain miles-a-day to follow – but now it had all gone out of the window, and I was in trouble. That evening, in my diary, I described my predicament:

“Something unusual happened today. I was halfway up a two-mile hill and something came at me that I’d never experienced before. It was at the point where my legs couldn’t go on, where my lungs couldn’t take in any more air and where a grey fog had started to cloud my mind and my eyes.

“I squinted up through the haze to try to locate the top of the hill, and saw I still had at least another mile to go until the summit. Another mile! I thought and thought, but nothing could tell me how I was going to do it. All my mind could come up with was ‘Stop’, ‘Turn back’, ‘End the torture’, and these were not the answers I was looking for. So I searched inside myself to find something else, something not from the rational world, but from a place which would enable me to keep on riding, even though everything told me I couldn’t.

“Ten minutes later and I had made it to the top. It felt great, wonderful… ecstatic! I had done it, somehow. Something had given me that extra energy – something beyond me, beyond my body and my mind.”

It was the next day, riding up another hill out of Monterey, that I realised what had really happened the day before. Another hill! Another last moment of torture at the end of the journey! Or is it this time? Is it torture anymore? Or is it something else entirely?

My mind began to cloud over and my legs began to flail, but that day I was ready, because I knew what to do.

“Don’t think about the pain,” I told myself. “Don’t think about how hard it is. Don’t think about how the world is against you. Just focus on the effort, on the toil. It won’t be easy – you won’t race up – but try to work at a constant level, thinking about nothing but the toil, because the toil is all there is.”

Buddhists would call this ‘dharma’, meaning the truth, the ultimate reality of the way things are. Halfway up the hill, the sensory world, ‘samsara’, had proved inadequate. When it came to the crunch, I found nothing there, nothing to help me up the hill, so I had to look for the answer elsewhere, and it was through this that I was able to see what was real. Getting to the top of the hill, I felt nothing – just the toil. My mind was empty and free.

Cycling for me was no longer just a mode of transport or a means of leisurely escape. It was a method of meditation, my path to enlightenment – ‘nirvana’ – and to an intense clarity that I had never felt before.

The next day, as I passed through Big Sur and its vast, smouldering cliffs, I started seeing the world through new, spiritual eyes. This is what I wrote...

“My mind is clear and now I understand what cycling quintessentially is: a way of being able to move, and to move with your surroundings. Everything you see, you hear, you feel, affects how you move, and you are at one with the world. I am on a road on the side of a cliff, and it is the most beautiful cliff in the world. I can feel the presence of a creator, and this is keeping me going. I’m experiencing beauty and nature at its most intense – outside and inside me at the same time.”

That is how cycling took me to a higher plain. Ever since, I have used it as my tool to view the world as it really is, to release my ego and open up to the beauty of what is around me, whether it is the sun shining over the ocean or a wet muddy path covered in cowpat.

I still look at maps, mileage and the calories of the food in my backpack, but now this is all to serve a greater purpose. I’m not at nirvana yet. But a lone road on an open highway will always take me that one pedal closer.