Circular motion

By Alec Duxbury

I have spent and will continue to spend hours and hours grooming my pedal stroke on a bicycle. The mechanical act of turning the pedals is a simple one, but the desire I have to make that mechanical act as smooth, round, and efficient as possible has occupied me for much of my life. It’s not that I think so much in terms that a smooth, round pedal stroke will get me from point A to point B with efficiency; it is more that I want that pedal stroke to be smooth and round for its own sake. Most of the time, I do not use my bicycle as a tool of transportation. I don’t use it to get anywhere. I go places on it (sometimes these rides are practical, but most of the time I ride my bicycle simply for its own sake), but my destination is always home. I use it as a tool to gain mental and physical fitness and health, and I use it as a tool for competition. I get these uses out of my bicycle by turning perfect circles with my feet. The motion I make with my feet mirrors the layout of every one of my rides: I leave from my home and return to it again.
All rides end where they begin. The true destination of all travel is to return home again. The physical nature of the globe dictates that if one walked away from one’s home and kept at it, one would return home with out ever having turned around. My feet pedal perfect circles and the cycle of the school year begins anew. What had ended has now begun in a progression that is seamless and round. As a high school English teacher, my life is governed by this cycle, and it is reflected in my pedal stroke, in the rides I take, in growing a year older every July 15th, in the birth of my children, and in the celebration of the anniversary of my marriage.
John Donne wrote in his poem, “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning”, where a dying (or departing, depends on how you want to read it) man speaks to his spouse: “you draw my circle just, and make me end where I begun.” I pedal perfect circles with my feet, and I find that motion at the core of my life’s meaning. If I can pedal a good circle, I can “draw my circle just.” In this light there is no difference between my pedal stroke, myself, and the circular patterns in my life. In my effort to pedal quality circles, I go away, and I come back. I read literature, and I extend my understanding of its meaning back over my intellectual experience and beyond it. I read the same literature again, and I find that intellectual circle I followed the last time did not extend quite far enough and I redraw it. I often do the redrawing while I am pedaling circles. I leave, and I come back. I was born, and I will die. My life is built upon the principles and balance of forces that produce circular motion.