See the World Vividly and Up Close

 

Clive Thompson - The Restorative Joy of Cycling

Thompson lists some common sense ideas: it's healthy, it's (often) easier (and often far less stressful) to navigate busy city streets, it makes you feel accomplished.

He also writes about how it helps me notice more:

You see the world vividly and up close

...when I’m cycling the whole world becomes high-res. As I whiz around NYC I …

… see the city with uniquely granular detail you get while biking, gliding past soaring prewar buildings, lunar potholes, a blizzard of fashion on the sidewalks, street vendors hawking candied peanuts, delivery trucks bedecked with graffiti. [snip] Cycling in New York makes the scenery pop.

Most people find that when they go for a walk, they absorb the street-scene better than when they race by in a car. Obviously! But cycling is, for me, the perfect sensual midpoint between the two. You get the visual banquet of walking, but because you’re going faster you get a bigger, longer feast — miles and miles of busy streets, in technicolor close-up.

He ends the article with a famous quote about biking:

Back in 1885, the bicycle was enjoying its first serious boom in popularity, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle — the guy who invented Sherlock Holmes — wrote an article for Scientific American about something he’d noticed in the saddle:

“When the spirits are low, when the day appears dark, when work becomes monotonous, when hope hardly seems worth having, just mount a bicycle and go out for a spin down the road, without a thought on anything but the ride you are taking.”