Originally Posted by
Prowler
I'm spoiled by the variety of bike trails around here so I choose not to deal with the car traffic youse all have discussed. I'm sure ours is just the same. So, since I don't have to deal with em I ride with my ear buds and my MP3 player stocked with acoustic music. Set the volume just above wind noise and roll thru the forest, often following a stream or river. I find that just about the time I'm no longer chilly - up to riding temperature - I've also dropped all thoughts of daily life, the future and the past. I can spend time just living in the moment. Maybe the Engineer in me makes that pretty rare but 'living in the moment' is pretty rare when not riding. Its a compelling experience: thinking of nothing, solving no problems, pondering no imponderables, fixing nothing that needs fixing, not planning to resolve recent mistakes, not evaluating candidates, not selecting routes or schedules or nuttin. Just riding, waltzing the pedals (3 downstrokes/second), watching the trees and the rippling water, tracking the clouds and sun. Nice
This is how I spend most of my non-commuting time riding. I used to live in S. Korea and would go hiking in the mountains that surround Seoul. I remember feeling stressed out about my future, and wanting to go for a hike to try to work through some of the things that were causing me stress. The funny thing was, the hiking trail's uneven path caused me to worry more about where I would put my foot next as I climbed up or down the mountains.
By the end of the trail, I would not have thought a lick about my problems, but the "being the moment" that pervaded the entire hike ended up relieving me of most of my stress anyways. No life-problems solved, but a feeling of mental and physical exhaustion relaxed me far more than anything else I'd tried, short of meditation. But I'm much too anxious to sit still, anyway.
Riding my bike does that for me now.