It’s August and I’m already starting to see the weather change. Mornings on the way to work are cool – in the 12-15 degree range instead of the sometimes 25 degree mornings of July. The sky is starting to show it’s autumn drama – sometimes with big grey clouds, other times with dazzling sun and clear weather. And of course I’m biking to work again now that it’s cooler. I don’t mind riding in hot weather but if it’s even a bit above 20 the 6 or so km it takes to get me to work makes it too sweaty to ride in normal clothes or to forego a shower upon arrival. And while it was fine to shower after a 20 km commute from our old place, riding 6 km to take a shower just feels like a hassle. But now I just toss my laptop in a pannier, put on a helmet and go. This is what it looks like.
And on the way back:
See what I mean about the sky? It’s something else!
I haven’t done a ton of long bike rides this summer but I’m exploring a few new places. I saw the Milne Dam to the northeast on a map and thought it’d be a fun trip:
This brings me to something I’ve been thinking a lot about this month: curiosity. This isn’t something that just popped into my mind. This NY Times article is a little doom-laden as you might gather from its title: “A.I. Is Giving Us Answers Right Away. That’s Making Us Dumber.” but I like articles like this because the solution is already evident. Just don’t use it. The conceit of the article is that curiosity puts our brain into a sort of “learning mode” that makes us more receptive and ready to remember things. So if we are curious about how to make a Thai dish, tofu pad krapow (basil tofu – try it or one of its non-veg cousins, it’s amazing) and we look for it using AI we will get an answer right away. But if we look for it in google, through browsing cooking blogs or visiting the library, we not only get the answer we were looking for, along the way we also consume other information. Maybe we learn about the origins of the dish, cooking methods, flavour balance, or go down a rabbit hole to learn about Thai history. And all that time, our curious brain is soaking information up.
And now I’m thinking about Naomi Alderman, someone whose substack I’ve recently started reading regularly. She’s an author of many books and also for my running friends, you may know her work in creating the “exercise game” Zombies Run! But what brought me to her this month has been her posts on the idea of creating a Couch to 5k for Reading, which I talked about last time. In a recent post she talked about following her curiosity when it comes to reading as an alternative to reading what we think we should be reading rather than what we want to read and that that makes reading more enjoyable – and hey, like I said above, you get the bonus of learning more.
But what if I did that in other aspects of our lives? Take bike rides. I love riding for riding’s sake, but the rides I love most are the ones where there is potential for new or interesting things to happen. I’m seeing a new place, I’m going somewhere interesting, or I could meet new people. I realize after all this curiosity talk that this is what led me to bicycle touring. I have no idea what interesting things I’ll see or who I’ll meet but I know that it’ll be great. This is what brought me to India (What’ll I see when I walk down a narrow street Varanasi? Who knows?) and when I combined the two I had the best time meeting new people multiple times a day, seeing things I’d never seen before, and at a human pace. I was ready to go back and do more the second I finished the first ride. This is what that looked like:
So my plan as the weather cools is to try to expand that curiosity to consume more of my free time. What interesting things can I find? What adventures can I go on? Let’s see where this goes.
The opposing force to curiosity is comfort. Comfort feels good and predictable. Comfort gives us the right answer right away and a day at work with no problems to solve. And comfort is my biggest enemy. Do you know the #1 thing that keeps me from going out for a bike ride on a Saturday? No, it’s not the weather, or being sleepy, or even being lazy. It’s the idea of a comfortable day spent in the house with my family doing the usual things we do. It just sounds so good. While there’s nothing wrong with that – and one should do that of course, it should also be balanced with chasing curiosity either together or apart. This is why Daegan and I go on bike tours or head to the art museum or why Sage and I go to random places for no clear reason. But it’s also good to go alone. I almost succumbed to the siren song of home Friday night even though I’d made a commitment to myself to go out. Sage was having none of it, though. While she agreed we’d have the best time she also knew I’d have a wonderful time out in the world at the place I was planning to go.
This place was Critical Mass – a monthly group bike ride that I used to go to often up until 2008. Enough cyclists come that the entire road can be taken up by them and so it’s safer than riding in a small group or alone. One of its original creators, Chris Carlsson came up with the idea after seeing people cross the street in Asia – enough people would bunch up together until there was a massive crowd that cars couldn’t stop. It’s a really lovely time and though it does give protest vibes sometimes and occasionally frustrates drivers because for safety the group will often stop cross traffic at red lights to allow the entire group to go through rather than allowing cars to intersperse with cyclists causing more danger. Layered on top of that are all of the other North American cyclist/driver tensions that I won’t mention here but you can find in any post about cyclist safety or even just one of someone riding through a city.
I stopped going because one ride in 2008 (which I missed – I have mixed feelings about this) the group of several hundred went up on the Gardiner Expressway and stopped traffic there. Bicycles are not permitted there and it caused a big ruckus. Whether it was good ruckus or bad ruckus is still the subject of debates. It looked like this:
What happened after that was that the ride itself got a significantly higher level of police action. We started having officers joining us, stopping the “corking” at intersections and breaking the group up. The interactions between police and riders was tension filled and not nice. Not fun at all and I didn’t go back – for over 20 years.
Friday’s ride did have a bit more protest thrown in, though, because our provincial government has been fighting (and recently won in court) to remove bike lanes within our city. Yes, people from outside the city, hundreds of kilometres away are legislating what happens in our city and the safety of cyclists in it. Many arguing against cycling infrastructure say that it slows traffic and there are hardly any cyclists. So we showed them how many of us there are. It is estimated that 700 to 1,000 of us came out. Look at us!
The vibe was still (mostly) celebratory: celebrating a good day, good company and the joy of being on our bikes. Though there was a bit of tension with some drivers, mostly, as you can hear from the supportive honking, people were happy to see us. This time, instead of police making it less safe, we had an escort at the front and rear of the ride lending not only safety but a sense of legitimacy to the ride that drivers mostly respected even if it did sometimes take a few minutes to be able to continue on their way. In the end, though, the whole ride covered just under 14 km in the space of around 1 hr 40 min. So overall the disruption was a little less than a typical rush hour on a short portion of a street that moved.
Here’s a view from my handlebar-mounted GoPro. You can get a feel for what the atmosphere is like. Overall, super positive and friendly. Lots of people had music as well – some on really nice stereo systems. As I heard one rider saying: “I just hang out in one place for a little while, enjoy the vibe and then shift to a different part of the crowd and find new music to listen to.”
It was such a good time, and while I would also have had a good time relaxing at home, this engagement with curiosity was definitely the right choice for the night. A good reminder to always chase that curiosity from books to food to where I go rather than resting in boring comfort.
What has you curious this month?
