In my experience, the best way to experience long-distance travel is by bicycle. It’s slow enough to see the world around you, but you can cover more distance than you can on foot. You’re exposed to the world and its elements. The difference between a car and a bicycle is the difference between watching a film strip run by, and being a part of it. Between seeing things and experiencing them. On a bike, you can’t cover more than about a hundred miles in a day (or at least, I can’t). You’re not chained to the meager miles of hiking, but the world is not swept by in the blur of motorized travel.

People at the end of their lives say that time seemed to be steadily speeding up. They say the first twenty years of their lives felt the same as the remaining sixty. I have a suspicion that repetition is to blame here. That the rhythm and echo of routine sucks our brains into a sleepy suspension, and that we find it so comforting that we end up mis-utilizing our time.

When you’re a kid everything you see is new, every interaction requires processing. Your first day of school is special precisely because it is your first time there. The second day is more familiar, and so on until it becomes a trial to be navigated instead of a source of wonder. Repetition is comforting, but not memorable. 

On my way to the office every day I ride through the same park. I can detail everything about that park. Every corner, every table, the retired steam engine that the kids climb on, the dinosaur bone sculpture that I once saw people using as a backdrop to a lightsaber fight video. However, I definitely can’t remember most single instances of being there. For me, getting out on tour is about not knowing what will happen. Every morning presents a nameless, unfamiliar future. Every morning presents only the proposition that today won’t be like yesterday. I am forced to pay attention, because all of it is new. New places, people, trails, forests, vistas, animals, and situations.

I can vividly remember every part of every day that I’ve ever travelled by bike. On tour, time not only doesn’t speed up, it slows down. The new interactions make my brain feel awake and active and utilizing its full capacity. 

When I am at the end of my life I would like to have more days remembered than forgotten. I would like to be able to feel like I’ve been around longer than I actually have. Being absorbed into the unknown isn’t just inspiring and exciting, It’s the way I want to be able to say I’ve lived my life.

At the end of a long ride, I struggle to talk with people about the experience. They ask how it was being in the wilderness on a bike for months and I say “it was awesome”. They nod and smile and we continue interacting and relating to each other in our normal realm of shared experience. 

It’s hard to express in that moment that there is a whole portion of our Venn diagram that they are blind toward, the portion that exists solely in my circle. That experience is both important to me, and unshared by a majority of the population. Humans crave shared experience and there just aren’t that many people in my life with whom I can share the experience of extended bike travel.

I say “it was awesome”, but awesome is a word I also sometimes use to describe certain sandwiches. They might be great, but the word is certainly a miscommunication when applied to those two wildly different things. What I mean is awesome in the most original sense, something that lifts me out of my normal state and places me firmly in the world of wonder.

That ability to make me sense new things and process new situations and information is, to me, incredibly powerful. It’s the same place I find myself when listening to music with truly new ideas. It is a state of inspiration. It is the perfect use of time.