Entries about 7

Bicycling is the nearest approximation I know to the flight of birds. The airplane simply carries a man on its back like an obedient Pegasus; it gives him no wings of his own.
Louis J. Helle, Jr. -- Spring in Washington

I thought of that while riding my bike.
Albert Einstein -- On the Theory of Relativity.

When the spirits are low, when the day appears dark, when work becomes monotonous, when hope hardly seems worth having, just mount a bicycle and go out for a spin down the road, without thought on anything but the ride you are taking.
Arthur Conan Doyle

For instance, the bicycle is the most efficient machine ever created: Converting calories into gas, a bicycle gets the equivalent of three thousand miles per gallon.
Bill Strickland -- The Quotable Cyclist

It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them. Thus you remember them as they actually are, while in a motor car only a high hill impresses you, and you have no such accurate remembrance of country you have driven through as you gain by riding a bicycle.
Ernest Hemingway

All the pathos and irony of leaving one’s youth behind is thus implicit in every joyous moment of travel: one knows that the first joy can never be recovered, and the wise traveler learns not to repeat successes but tries new places all the time.”
Paul Fussell

¨Living well is an art which can be developed.

Of course, you will need the basic talents to build upon: They are love of life and ability to take great pleasure from small offerings, an assurance that the world owes you nothing and that every gift is exactly that, a gift.

Because of the routines we follow, we often forget that life is an ongoing adventure.

We leave our homes for work, acting and believing that we will reach our destinations with no unusual event startling us out of our set expectations.

The truth is we know nothing, not where our cars will fail or when our buses will stall, whether our places of employment will be there when we arrive, or whether, in fact, ourselves will arrive whole and alive at the end of our journeys.

Life is pure adventure, and the sooner we realize that, the quicker we will be able to treat life as art: to bring our energies to each encounter, to remain flexible enough to notice and admit when what we expected to happen did not happen.

We need to remember that we are created creative and can invent new scenarios as frequently as they are needed.¨

Maya Angelou