Riding the spirit wind.

Seeker of the flow.

You are alone. Out there. By yourself. No one is there to help you up if you fall. No one is there to cuddle you into sleep. Failures, mechanicals, ups and downs- it’s all there.

And you’re the only one to take it all in.

Welcome to the outside world- the place where dreams end, the place where nightmares start.

The human becomes a machine on his machine. Pedaling becomes breathing. Riding becomes a living. The countryside flies by, useless thoughts assail you, and you start thinking, when all you wanted was not to think. When all you wanted to do was to forget the world around you.

But maybe that’s because they are not so uselss? Face it. It’s therapy. You are sick and dying. You need to be cured from a disease. A therapy from the endless cycle of life. You need to connect two mediums that gap the biggest chasms. Two words, two notions.

Nothing. Everything.

Riding makes you forget about all the problems in your life, but it makes you think along the lines of more important thoughts.

Life is like a bicycle: it needs to be kept moving. Sometimes you can take a pause. But you’ll be back on the saddle. Because time will forge on ahead, and leave you behind.

Not that I care about time.

When I’m on my bike, I never ask myself if I’m ‘there yet’.

I embrace the wind on my cheek, the pain in my legs, the scream in my butt. I don’t really care if time is slipping away, because — hey — the time I enjoy wasting is not wasted time after all.

That’s because riding is not about going fast, going slow, going far or about going anywhere. Riding is just about riding and being in the flow.

Riding in the flow, being in the flow, breathing the flow and living with the flow.

What the heck is flow?

A divine state of mind where you are focused on everything, yet let go of everything. Where you perceive everything yet blur everything. A state where yourself reveals itself to you. Where the conscious and the unconscious merge and become one shivering creature: you.

Being in the flow is essential to riding — living properly — , and that is why we go out riding: to seek it. But we’re all doing the same mistake: looking for it.

Like love or sudden unhappy mistakes in life, it blossoms when we expect it the least. You don’t have to search for flow, flow searches for you. So stop being so evasive.

But this thing is really a hard thing to get your hands on. Flow is a pretty deceptive notion of time, because the only way we know it’s there is when it has already gone. And when it has already gone, we have already forgotten about it.

So the next time you are out riding a bike, forget about the next tires you’re going to buy, forget about that grocery list, forget about that urgent paper to do, forget about that rent.

Because riding is for riding. It’s not to be untainted. You’re out there in the scenery- being the scenery. Looking in the dark woods for something you’ve always wanted to have.

And the less you think, the more you do, and the more you see how everything doesn’t make sense. And the faster you stop trying to understand the world, the faster you will accept it, the better you will ride and the better you will live.

Please leave a trace of your passage- a clap, a comment, or breadcrumbs. It keeps me going. Thanks!