Author Topic: Cycle to happiness article  (Read 3578 times)

in4

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Danneaux

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Re: Cycle to happiness article
« Reply #1 on: December 18, 2012, 09:04:00 AM »
Ian,

The bicycle *may* indeed be the best thing we have ever invented, as indicated by a 2005 UK national survey of people's favourite inventions: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4513929.stm

I know I wouldn't be where I am without it, and the bicycle has proven a wonderful form of immediate stress-relief for me when maxed-out on work/past school tasks and in need of a blowoff valve.

Yep, a wonderful yet still not fully appreciated device.

I enjoyed the comments on the article as much as the article -- Bonus!  :D A great find nicely shared, Ian; thanks!

All the best,

Dan.

bikepacker

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Re: Cycle to happiness article
« Reply #2 on: December 18, 2012, 12:28:04 PM »
Thanks for sharing this article it expressed some of my sentiments and the reasons that I cycle most days.
If you want to be happy learn to be alone without being lonely.
If you want to enjoy the world see it from the saddle of a bike.
If you want to experience beauty camp alone in a spectacular place.
If you want release your anxieties cease excuses and take actions.

JimK

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Re: Cycle to happiness article
« Reply #3 on: December 18, 2012, 01:32:01 PM »
This short article started off as if it were a review of this little book:

http://www.librarything.com/work/13127634

which I recently read - that's my short review at the other end of that link. Happier, more mindful people, that does sound like a good idea!

bikepacker

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Re: Cycle to happiness article
« Reply #4 on: December 18, 2012, 01:48:16 PM »
This short article started off as if it were a review of this little book:

http://www.librarything.com/work/13127634

which I recently read - that's my short review at the other end of that link. Happier, more mindful people, that does sound like a good idea!

I believe another one of my Christmas pressies.  ;)
If you want to be happy learn to be alone without being lonely.
If you want to enjoy the world see it from the saddle of a bike.
If you want to experience beauty camp alone in a spectacular place.
If you want release your anxieties cease excuses and take actions.

Andybg

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Re: Cycle to happiness article
« Reply #5 on: December 18, 2012, 02:37:06 PM »
A much enjoyed article

Thanks

Andy

Andre Jute

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Re: Cycle to happiness article
« Reply #6 on: December 18, 2012, 03:34:01 PM »
http://www.librarything.com/work/13127634
which I recently read - that's my short review at the other end of that link. Happier, more mindful people, that does sound like a good idea!

That's the sort of review authors pray for, Jim, substantial, well-considered, knowledgeable, specific without spoilers, magisterially unbiased. Whether that particular author will also consider it fair depends on his experience as a writer...

Drop me a note to andrejute at coolmainpress with the commercial extension if you would like to be added to my publisher's advance review copy list.

Andre Jute
http://coolmainpress.com/home.html

energyman

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Re: Cycle to happiness article
« Reply #7 on: December 18, 2012, 06:36:19 PM »
So I guess that the more bikes you have the happier you will be ??

John Saxby

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Re: Cycle to happiness article
« Reply #8 on: February 12, 2013, 02:14:31 AM »
Nice article; especially nice to get scientific support for one's own opinions & obsessions!  I often sign off with, "The road to contentment may be travelled only on two wheels."   And a happy turn of phrase from the English writer Tim Hilton, like so many of us d'un certain âge: "You're always young on the bike."

But at the risk of sounding heretical, and much as I love my bikes, there's little (for me) to match the beauty and movement of solo paddling in a good canoe on a quiet lake in the Canadian Shield. (The absence of traffic plays its part, for sure.)  Pierre Trudeau said this about the subject: 

"What sets a canoeing expedition apart is that it purifies you more rapidly and inescapably than any other. Travel a thousand miles by train and you are a brute; pedal five hundred on a bicycle and you remain basically a bourgeois; paddle a hundred in a canoe and you are already a child of nature."

    [A paragraph from his essay,  "Exhaustion and Fulfillment: The Ascetic in a Canoe" (1944) ]

I disagreed with Himself on many things -- but could only admire his love for & skill with a canoe.  (Not to mention the fact that most public figures don't write about such things.)

J.

Andre Jute

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Re: Cycle to happiness article
« Reply #9 on: February 12, 2013, 07:00:25 AM »
That is very fine, John, very fine indeed.

Sounds, though, like he wasn't quite in touch with his constituency. Back then cycling was pretty much a working class obsession, not bourgeois at all.

Andre Jute
« Last Edit: February 13, 2013, 01:51:16 AM by Hobbes »

John Saxby

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Re: Cycle to happiness article
« Reply #10 on: February 12, 2013, 08:01:19 PM »
Thanks, Andre. His Nibs grew up in Westmount, in Montreal, surrounded by gazillions of bourgeois, so that was probably his reference. I thought he was being a bit harsh on cycling, but I cut him some slack to let him make his point about paddling; and was tickled to see that a politician would write about things like exhaustion, fulfilment & ascetics (even if he wasn't a politician at the time.)

He wasn't above stoking his own image--I thought the fringed buckskin shirt was a bit tacky, for example, esp for someone who'd paddled the Nahanni (very serious cred among canoeists, esp before there were guided tours).  But then, he was a politician, and I guess his handlers told him that more people know about buckskin shirts than know about the Nahanni.

He really was his own bloke, though:  used to drive around town in a 300SLR roadster (when he was in town--I think that, even as Prime Minister, he used to dash back to Montreal as often as he could.)  Nice touch at the very end, too: three of his 6 pallbearers were Leonard Cohen, Jimmy Carter, and Fidel.  A few years ago, I went with my daughter, when she was about 20, to the War Museum, which has a video clip of Trudeau talking with a CBC reporter at the time of the FLQ/War Measures Act crisis in 1971. It's a famous interview: the reporter says, "Just how far would you go, Mr Prime Minister?" Trudeau says, barely suppressing a shrug, "Just watch me."  Meg turned to me & said, "He was some dude, eh, Dad?"

J.

Andre Jute

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Re: Cycle to happiness article
« Reply #11 on: February 13, 2013, 02:01:26 AM »
My fave pol in the Trudeau mode is Don Dunstan, who used to be Premier of South Australia back in the 1970s. One of those catastrophist idiots that shoot up now and again (currently the global warmies, back then the big freezers, James Hansen of NASA being the motivating force behind both) got a bit of newspaper attention for a forecast of a huge flood swamping Adelaide. On the appointed day Dunstan went down to the beach and stood with his arms open, waiting for tsunami, which of course didn't arrive. On a Sunday he would stop by my table at Mama's up the Barossa and not make a point of knowing everyone's name around the table, which people noted when on one occasions there was a painful lacuna while a pol from the other party came to our table and went through a dozen names, gears visibly twirling behind his eyes, his fingers twitching for the white card the aide absent on a Sunday was of course not handing him. I remember Dunstan, who watched this from his table nearby, saying later, "I felt sorry for his wife." A human being.