I’m looking for some inspired and inspiring thoughts on cycling to help me promote cycle specific fundraising challenge.
It’s to get some cycling provision for an autism charity, specifically working with people with high-functioning autism and Asperger’s Syndrome. I want to write a short piece to get people thinking about how enlighening it can be to realise where riding a bike can take you (metaphorically and literally) and enrich your life. All the inspiring, positive stuff.
I guess how I’m looking at it is that getting on a bicycle can be hugely liberating and empowering if your daily living is constrained by what most of us regard as mundane challenges. Being given the chance to try it for the first time could be great in itself. For me, when I was growing up, my bike was massively important to me. It opened up a larger world for me to explore – I was lucky to grow up where I did and each venture out encouraged me to make another to go a bit further. I’m still on something like that trajectory now. It was also a bit like Graeme Obree’s escape from the bullies but although that’s easy to understand it’s hardly a positive analogy to make for the purpose I intend.
For the people that I hope would take advantage of being able to access cycling in a supported and safe way it may open up all kinds of possibilities. There’s a lad I support who had lived 22 years at the foot of a very small hill on the edge of his town and until last summer had never ventured up it. It’s a quarter of mile from his house to the flat topped hill which is all open meadows and although only about a hundred feet higher than the buildings down the lane the views are fantastic. Now, he’s interested in knowing about wildlife and flora on the hill. It took a little bit of encouragement and support and widened his world a little. There’s probably no one on this forum who wouldn’t have spent most of their childhood in those meadows on that hill had they grown up there.
So that’s kind of what I’m pondering.
Thoughts? Quotes? Personal epiphanies?