R. D. Kushner
September 25, 2002

From time to time there are instances in a person's life where time and thought are suspended so as to allow for experience to be the entire conduit through which perception flows. In these instances it is as if the body controls the mind, rather than vice versa. Where a subtle gesture of the hand can conjure entire universes into being and then make them disappear in the same instant. This realm of creative indulgence usually sits locked away in some unknown corridor of the psyche, but on occasions it suddenly stirs and sets the mind ablaze.

As a vehicle for locomotion the bicycle has been surpassed by the automobile, the train, and the airplane. But as a vehicle for carrying the mind into its brilliant domain of self-expression it has no equal.

Take for example the act of learning to ride a bicycle; consider that there is not in existence, a written document capable of demonstrating to the human mind the necessary mechanics which allow the body to balance on a bicycle. Consider that the bicycle represents an impossible intellectual obstacle, over which the mind has absolutely no power. Force diagrams and velocity equations are nothing more than a futile attempt to describe something that cannot be experienced except through corporeal investigation.

Through trial and error the bicycle is transformed from an intellectually insurmountable apparatus into a device by which the body takes hostage the mind. In this act of balancing the body tricks the mind into acknowledging the empirically impossible. In that instant the mind recognizes the power of the body and is thus forever robbed of its calculated superiority. This sets up a polemic for the rest of the conscious existence, as the mind struggles to suppress the human instinct to accept the possibility of the impossible.

Life then begins to look like a series of reasonable goals and expectations which the mind prods the body to engage as if in some metaphysical circus performance. When the curtain closes on this act, however, what is revealed is that the success of the mind is nothing more than a pretense for extraordinary living. On the bicycle, the reality of life is altered.

The future should be ridden into on two wheels. A bicycle is a vehicle for the impossible; which is nothing more than a concept which the mind creates to control the bold and beautiful ambitions into which the body blindly hurls itself. In most instances the body only knows what the mind tells it; but on the bicycle this relationship is radically reversed and the body automatically asserts its preeminent standing in the mind-body relationship.

On the bicycle there is the possibility of possibilities; balancing on those two wheels, turning and cutting into the future like a carbide blade.