When I was cycling across the country on my bike, I spent anywhere from six to nine hours a day in the saddle—for almost three solid months.
It made a lot of people wonder: What did you listen to all day long?
“Was it mostly music, or more like audiobooks, podcasts?” asked a friend of mine when we went for a drink at a bar after I got back home. “What was on your playlist?”
“Nothing,” I said.
She frowned slightly, as if she’d misheard me. “What do you mean, ‘nothing?’”
“I mean, nothing. I don’t listen to anything when I ride,” I replied. “I don’t even wear earbuds.”
You could see the wheels of her mind grind to a standstill. “What the hell. You . . . you just ride along in . . . in what? In total silence?”
“More or less,” I said, laughing.
“Allll dayyy longgg??”
“Yeah.”
She was gobsmacked. “I would go completely out of my mind.”
And my friend wasn’t alone in her astonishment. Nearly everyone, upon learning that I’d rawdogged a 4,150-mile cross-country cycling trip, looked utterly dumbstruck—bereft, almost. I began to realize that while most people think it’s pretty daunting to cycle the entire U.S.A., they can vaguely imagine what it would be like as a physical challenge: Daunting, sure, but you just put your butt in the saddle and keep going, and you’ll get there. They don’t want to do that epic, exhausting ride, but they can comprehend it.
But the idea of avoiding all media, all day long? They have no mental equipment to imagine that. It completely breaks their model of how the world works.
Except here’s the thing: It’s kind of awesome.
Silence is golden
Now the thing is, I am not some sort of anti-technology, anti-screens guy. I don’t avoid media on principle, like one of our modern wild-eyed destroy-your-phone desert prophets. Quite the opposite. Even when I’m on a road cycling trip, I use my phone a ton—to navigate, to check the weather (tornado alert apps are particularly useful in Kansas, let me tell you), or just to dork around on social media.
But during the act of cycling itself? Silence, it turns out, is golden.
Part of why I don’t wear earbuds while riding is safety. I’m often riding along smaller county roads with SUVs and 16-wheelers hooshing past, barely a few feet away. I want to sense when they’re coming up behind me. I want to be able to hear the dopplering thrum of an approaching engine. I once tried some earbuds that let the outside sound bleed through, which kind of worked. Still, I worried I might get too absorbed in the music, and stop being vigilant about the traffic. So I ditched them.
But I found that I didn’t miss it. It turns out that, when I turn off media for seven hours on end, my cycling brain goes to some really interesting places.
One of the things about cycling is that your mind is simultaneously busy and free. Cycling requires you to make a lot of constant, tiny decisions: Avoid that pothole, watch out for that pedestrian, swerve around that constellation of broken glass near the curb. You need to be vigilant. The psychologist Nick Moore writes about how navigating traffic on a bike requires a “minutely focused state.” The world contracts to “a space just a few inches wide and a million miles long, outside which nothing exists.”
But these decisions aren’t hard to make, and they’re over quickly, so I don’t wind up being mentally exhausted by them.
A feast for the senses
Meanwhile, there’s a ton of stimulation. Cycling cross-country is a feast for the senses. While arriving in a city, I’d pass by ornate graffiti inside railway underpasses and marvel at the often-corroded architecture on the outskirts of town. Downtown, I’d hear things—snatches of overheard conversation from people I passed by, or bits of Bhangra music blasting from a fast-food joint.
Out in the deep countryside of the Great Plains, I’d pass by sprawling crop-watering machinery—splayed across fields like a massive stick insect—and watch it come alive in the dawn, puffing clouds of mist over the green wheat and corn. I saw road signs dented with bullet holes, a swollen river that had swallowed an SUV during a storm swell, and a massive longhorn that stared closely at me as I nervously rode past. In the Rocky Mountains, I came across a 16-wheeler hauling a single blade for a wind turbine so massive that it was the length of a city block.
Your senses feel like they’re constantly engaged in a non-stressed fashion—like your body is constantly taking notes on the world around you.
It’s a neat interplay of forces: Cycling occupies your forebrain with a welter of tiny decisions, while also feeding your mind with the chill and gorgeous spectacle of the world at large. Together, it seems to loosen up my hindbrain—shifting it into a new and meditative gear.
Pondering ideas
Often, I’d find myself pondering ideas triggered by the world around me. While cruising through Trenton, New Jersey, I passed a crumbly little strip mall with a tae kwon do joint next to a hot yoga salon, and it started me marveling at how America has phagocytosed so many of the world’s historic physical/mental/spiritual-fitness cultures and absorbed them, Borg-like, into the Puritan quest of bettering our fallen, lazy gnostic selves.
I’ll also discover that, almost without noticing it, I’m meditating on a bigger life issue—some challenge at work, some memory of my late mother, some friend I’ve been meaning to call, a passage in a book I’d forgotten but that now intrigues the hell out of me. I often suspect those deep, arc-of-life thoughts rise up precisely because of the curious, tripartite mental state of cycling. The top layer of vigilance keeps me focused, the stimulus of the world inspires ideas, while the deep ocean of my latent mind churns quietly—until, suddenly, some “aha” moment pierces the surface, like a cresting dolphin.
Now, I don’t want to oversell the mental state of cycling in silence! This is not about experiencing soul-shattering Eat-Pray-Love breakthroughs out there in the saddle. I haven’t had any Einstein-level insights. It’s more like it creates a useful atmosphere in the mind. I come back less jittery, more prepared to handle the everyday thinking of life.
Would listening to music or podcasts or audiobooks break that spell? Would it block that sense of flow? I suspect so. In my daily life, I’m not about to stop listening to music or stop scrolling around on my phone. I’m a nerd; I love marinating in news and essays about science and technology and culture.
But on the road, I need silence.