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• 1 2026-03-20T13:31:42-07:00 Feeling the Breeze 19 Reading/Interpreting plain 2026-04-14T12:29:54-07:00 Biking offers a fundamentally different way of experiencing the world.  

  When I ride my bike, I feel the wind in my hair and the sun on my skin. I notice the texture of the road, the shifts in temperature, and the sounds of my surroundings. These sensations cannot be measured or quantified within the logic of the Grand Narrative—they resist being reduced to economic value.

  This is why I approach biking through phenomenology, the study of lived, first-person experience. Rather than adopting a detached “view from above,” biking provides an embodied “view from below,” grounded in direct interaction with the environment.

  Cyclists experience the world while moving through it. 
  
  In Montreal, this is especially visible in winter, when riders adapt to the cold with layered clothing and specialized gear (even wearing ski helmets and goggles). Unlike drivers, who remain enclosed within controlled environments, cyclists remain exposed to—and engaged with—the elements. Through this, we are reminded of the Earth that we live on and occupy, rather than being in our own air-conditioned car ecosystems that separate us from the nature that surrounds us. 
   

  "I want to see as much of the world as possible and believe the best way to see it is by bicycle. No window frame putting a box around what you can see, no motor helping you on tough terrain, and sticking to land routes where feasible...

  [What cyclists do best is] finding magic, observing the world up close and leaving it, mostly, unchanged.”
   - The Joy of Cycling

  
  This separation raises important questions that must be considered as we live in the Anthropocene:
  • How does it feel to live in a car-centered world?
  • What would it feel like to live in a bike-centered world?
   

  Phenomenology is the philosophical study of conscious, first-person experience, focusing on how individuals perceive and interpret the world (the "lifeworld") rather than on objective, external reality

  
   

  
  Pictures of the Earth's impact on me when I fell off my bike

  Pictures of the Earth's impact on me when I fell off my bike
  
  The car world is one that is removed from nature, from the very planet that it moves through, and even the energy source (horsepower) that it claims to have. 
  
  Being in a car is like being in your own ecosystem, moving through the Earth without being part of it, but being enclosed inside your own individual ecosystem. You can be moving 80 miles per hour, flying down roads that pierce through plains, cut through forests, and sail past oceans, without ever feeling the breeze in your hair. You may only be reminded of the life surrounding you when the smell of a skunk or manure sneaks its way into your air-conditioned atmosphere.  
  
  By focusing on feeling and embodiment, biking challenges the Anthropocene's abstraction and "externalization of nature," and instead reconnects human movement to the physical world.