English practice 38

Why I Ride a Bicycle

I waited thirty-two years before I rode a bicycle for the first time, down a tree-lined street in Toronto. I had barely sat on one before, so there were a few false starts as my out instructions beside 1 me. But then I found I was moving. And since I, more than most objects, seem to obey Newton’s first law of motion—an object in motion will remain in motion until acted upon by an external force—off I went, whizzing downhill, weaving like a drunk, and idiotically.

I didn’t stop until three blocks a car was speeding toward the intersection. I’d not yet learned to brake, so I just dropped both feet to the ground inelegantly. Then I got back on the bicycle and did the whole thing again.

I don’t know why I’d never learned to ride before, a rite of passage that most people somewhere around age six. Clearly, not all middle-class parents in India teach children to ride bicycles. Mine certainly didn’t. I had singing lessons and, briefly, dancing lessons. I had math tutors and physics tutors. I even had swimming lessons but no bicycles.

It’s strange to come to this mysterious activity as an adult. Most people my age for so long they give little thought to an act that is nothing short of miraculous. But getting on a bike for the first time at thirty-three reveals the triumph of physics and human will that is cycling. Five hundred years ago, someone (the tireless Leonardo da Vinci, it was thought) drew a sketch of what was meant to be the though both sketch and artist are now disputed. Since then we’ve had the “walking machine” (Baron von Drais of Sauerbrun’s wooden two-wheeled contraption without pedals, designed to aid walkers—a bicycle even I could have ridden), velocipedes, ordinaries, and high-wheel tricycles. of engineering and machine-age design, but also of something more intangible.

is to balance two tubes of rubber and wire, connected by a frame, and to propel them forward with no more than a little foot power and the conviction that you can. We think bicycles carry us forward, but they them. It is largely human will that bicycle and rider in motion, as well as be adapted into an exhortation: move, because if you are moving, you will keep moving.