Biking to Costco as an Example of Attunement with the Way

AKA: Exercise is good.

Two events of note occurred within a few weeks of each other in the fall of 2019. I said farewell to my minivan and I started this newsletter. At the time I made no connection between these two life changes. Four years later, they seem marvelously intertwined.

Giving up my car kicked off an unexpected journalistic mini-arc. First, I wrote an elegy to my minivan, published in Men’s Journal, which still brings a tear to my eye when I reread it. My lack of a car led to regular bike trips to Costco, which spawned articles praising the car-free life, and various contemplations of west coast and east coast Armageddon.  

Today, this arc has reached its apogee, with a piece in the New York Times extolling the philosophy of “errands as exercise.” My father worked for the Times for 20 years, so cracking the daily paper brings with it no small sense of satisfaction, even though it is amusing to me that the topic is exercise psychology and not either of the subjects I have spent my career reporting on: China, or technology.

And yet, it is all connected. A month or so ago I was searching my computer files for a picture of my bike trailer in front of Costco, and I stumbled upon a document with the title “Biking to Costco as an example of Attunement to the Way.” The creation date of the file was November 2020, but there was only one sentence written in the body of the document; the eponymous: “Biking to Costco as an example of Attunement to the Way.”

Oh yeah: Occasionally, late at night, under the influence of one thing or another, I jot down profound ideas for newsletter posts. More often than not, these fancies are epiphanies of Daoist enlightenment that don’t stand the test of a single cup of coffee in the cold light of the morning after.

But now I know that I was onto something real that night. Just a year after giving up my car, I could already see that relying on my bike for transport was improving my health, with consequent positive downstream effects on my mood and productivity. I had never planned it that way. I was just spontaneously aligning with my environment, going with the flow in the purest possible way.

Writing the newsletter — cycling for the mind — has proved equally liberating and spontaneous and healthy. I can feel my muscle tone firming, my craft sharpening, my eagerness to write about my daily rabbit hole dive perpetually reinvigorating.

I have been exercising all the time, and holy moly, suddenly I’m in the New York Times. Maybe the road to Shu isn’t so hard after all!