I do long distance solo road cycling. The riding takes just enough of my cognitive capacity that the rest of my mind wanders lightly, usually not thinking about anything of substance. It feels like meditation to me.

Yes, if you’re on a car free path, even better!

For a confident road cyclist it is usually a better experience to be on an actual road than a cycle path even though you have to manage vehicular traffic.

The city I grew up in used to have lots of rail routes and they were converted into mixed use paths, some paved, others gravel.

It's so much nicer to enjoy a car free path, where you don't have the sounds, smells and brake dust to breath from cars. More trees on a path than a road.

I am a good cyclist, I ride in downtown Toronto, but if I want to space out and let my mind really wander, a path is orders of magnitude better than a actual road.

There is no benifit to navigating traffic and risking injury. More relax and free to stop or slow and take notes.

There is nothing better about being on a road with cars vs, in a nice park or path.

Eh. Not the op, but calm backroads are perfect for such rides. Good enough surface so no need to scan it for the better line as on gravel roads or offroad. Little traffic. And cars are much more predictable than the chaos of bike paths.

Similarly, in the summer I do long open sea swims, and the calm is incredible when it's just you and nature, nothing else. Your mind is guided to focus at the task at hand and lets you wander around just a bit. The post-activity decompression is also real nice afterglow to complete the experience.

It’s amazing what 5 minutes spent picking weeds out of my garden does for my mental health.

You know what, that’s pretty depressing.

Why?

Weeding is the act of removing unwanted plants, known as weeds, from a garden or other area where they are not desired. Capitalism "weeds" out the people that are marked for inefficiency.

I see this mimicking of capitalism as a depressing attempt to be in control. A re-expression of the power dynamic.

This is just my opinion.

"Tending", which is the act of removing undesirable parts of whatever, isn't a parallel to how capitalism favors a winner-takes-it-all scenarios, if that's what you're alluding to.

If you're growing edible stuff, you need to remove the weed in many parts of the world otherwise you won't have any vegetables eventually as the weeds will overgrow everything else. You also don't want something you cannot eat to take nutrients and sun from what you can eat.

You also don't want [someone who] cannot [work fast enough] to take [efficiency] from [the assembly line].

Not every company works like that. But every gardener removes weeds from their edible stuff.

You also cull weak animals for the good of the flock/herd, to avoid dysgenic traits from them being passed down. You also clean your house. You also peel and trim a potato before cooking it.

Gardening and horticulture are ancient human activities that are incredibly old, the act of tending to and cultivating one's garden is a really delightful way to center the mind and get into a place where one is more grounded, connected to nature, and about as disconnected from capitalist interests a thing as you'll find. It's humanizing.

Just because the suits took a metaphor from gardening doesn't mean you have to think like the suits, maybe you want to liberate yourself from the kind of dehumanizing thinking where capitalism rather than nature is the central frame of reference.

I'm currently on a week-long vacation and it's been so long since I had some proper time off that I forgot how slowly time flows when you're not under pressure.

Have much more respect for "yard work" after realizing how therapeutic it is.Hours in the sun doing heavy work after sitting at a desk all week is incredibly relaxing and something i look forward to.

The missing part in a lot of this is the deliberate silence. Sure, I enjoy catching up with podcasts, but it’s hard to fully settle in and hear your own thoughts if there is other audio on the go.