If someone told you that there was one thing that you could do every single day that would make you healthier, help the environment, boost the economy, and maybe even make the world a better place, would you do it? Well, good news! There is one thing you can do that accomplishes all of that: riding a bicycle.

Riding a bicycle may seem like just a small, unimportant act. How could pedaling once or twice a day make the world a better place? But while cycling is certainly a simple act—you are, after all, just pushing down one foot after the other—the benefits are limitless.

Bicycles make us smile, they keep us in good shape, and they help us make positive changes. Riding a bicycle is empowering, freeing, because you are dependent only on yourself. A bicycle gives you autonomy. The one thing needed to get you from point A to point B on a bicycle is you. You don’t need to buy a ticket; you don’t have to follow a timetable. You don’t need to go to the gas station to refuel; you don’t need to check the oil. You don’t need special gear or vocabulary or advanced technical knowledge. You need a bicycle and yourself. That’s all.

People who cycle regularly have been shown to be healthier and live longer, with better blood pressure and a lower likelihood of being overweight than their car-driving counterparts. Women who bike thirty minutes a day or more have a lower risk of breast cancer, and adolescents who bike are almost 50 percent less likely to be overweight as adults.

But the benefits of cycling aren’t just personal. When we ride, we inherently make our communities a better place to live. More cyclists on the road—who might otherwise be driving a car or taking the bus—means reduced carbon emissions. For example, in the bike-friendly Danish capital of Copenhagen, bike traffic prevents 90,000 tons of CO2 from being emitted annually. If in the United States each of us made just one four-mile roundtrip by bicycle instead of by car each week, we would burn almost two billion fewer gallons of gas per year.

How often does something that makes us feel personally great also offer an extensive list of external benefits? Even those riding a bicycle for only selfish reasons are doing their part (even if they don’t realize it), benefiting the entire community around them. Given all the benefits, what’s stopping us from riding?

Many of us learned to ride as children, yet somewhere in the journey into adulthood we lose the art of cycling. Pull up a memory of your first bicycle. Maybe it was red, maybe it was blue. Maybe it had streamers on the handlebars. Maybe it had those crazy colored spoke beads that made noise as the wheels turned. Whatever your first bicycle looked like, chances are you probably remember it clearly. That first bicycle is an inerasable vision forever etched into our memory. Remember learning how to ride that bicycle? Think back. You feel your father’s, your mother’s, your uncle’s, your older sister’s hand holding the back of the seat as they run beside you, making sure you don’t fall. At first, you’re timid. You pedal, reassured that someone is there to hold you. You get into a rhythm. You look to your side; whoever was holding you is gone. You are pedaling on your own. The exhilaration mounts. You are riding by yourself!

That first bicycle, and the process of learning how to ride, sticks with us for as long as we live, because our first bicycle represents our first taste of true freedom. The bicycle is a door to many opportunities, particularly for a child. It’s a new, efficient mode of transportation, and one that you—and only you—are responsible for. Those first few pedal strokes without an adult holding on to the back of the bicycle to steady you are freeing. You are alive. You are in control. You can do anything.

Riding a bike as a child was fun. It was simple. If you wanted to hop on your bike, you didn’t spend too long thinking about it; you just did it. It was freeing. You could go where you wanted. You could explore. You went fast. Really fast. You probably scraped your knees in a few tumbles, but you didn’t care. You got back on the bicycle and did it all over again.

If we were once so in love with riding our bicycles, what is it that stops so many of us from doing it as we get older? Because we forget the bicycle’s simplicity. Unfortunately, the bicycle’s simplicity and pace are rarely accommodated in the design of urban and suburban sprawl. If there are bike lanes, there are few of them, and the built environment around us encourages four wheels and not two. But we also complicate the act of riding a bicycle, and in the face of those complications, many of us become intimidated.

If it’s not the thought of riding in traffic that scares us, it may be the thought of going into a bicycle shop and not knowing what to ask for. Or it’s thinking that we don’t have the right clothes. Or we don’t have a bicycle at all, and how do we even begin looking for one?

There is no reason to be afraid or intimidated; just about anyone who can walk can ride. And the more people who ride, the easier it becomes for even more people to do it. If we want to build a society that’s more bike friendly, the best thing that we can do is to start cycling ourselves. Then we can get a friend cycling. And then another, and another. This has already started to happen, and in many cities around the world bike usage is growing—which benefits all of us.

Reprinted with permission from Hello, Bicycle, ©2016 by Anna Brones. Published by Ten Speed Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC. Illustrations © 2016 by James Gulliver Hancock.

Anna Brones is a Swedish- American freelance writer and author of Fika: The Art of the Swedish Coffee Break, The Culinary Cyclist, and Paris Coffee Revolution, as well as a staff writer at Sprudge, and a recipe developer at Adventure Journal. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, Saveur, The Guardian, BBC, T Magazine, Eater, Food52, PUNCH, and more. http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/252265/hello-bicycle-by-anna-brones/