I could start by telling you I’m a motorcyclist. But that wouldn’t be enough.
I could tell you I love back roads, unhurried hairpin turns, villages that don’t appear in travel guides, sunsets watched from above a fuel tank. But that wouldn’t be enough either.
The truth is this blog isn’t just about motorcycles. It’s about time. About how we use it. About how we let it slip away.
The day that changed everything
My father passed away at 68. Too soon.
He never loved motorcycles — and yet it was him, completely out of the blue, who gave me my first real bike when I was 18. To this day I don’t know why he did it. Maybe he knew. What I do know is that with that gesture he gave me much more than a motorcycle — he gave me a road, in the broadest sense that word can carry.
And then he was gone, leaving me with that road still ahead and a question I’d never asked myself: was I actually travelling it? Or was I running without ever looking at it?
The problem is that “later” never arrives when you plan it. It comes too soon, or it doesn’t come at all. And in the meantime you’ve spent years running — towards a promotion, towards a bigger house, towards a version of yourself that would satisfy a list of expectations you can’t even remember writing.
My father worked. He planned for the future. He was responsible, as one should be. And then, at 68, the future was over.
I don’t say this to be pessimistic. I say it because that loss gave me the most precious thing one can receive: clarity.
What I understood
I understood that life is not a corridor to race through as fast as possible to reach the end. It’s a road — and a road only makes sense if you look at it while you travel it.
I understood that the things that truly matter aren’t in the future. They’re right now: in the inner rhythm you sometimes feel and almost always ignore, in the person beside you, in the passions you’ve been putting off for years because “first I need to sort things out.”
I understood that slowing down is not a weakness. It’s the most courageous choice you can make in a world that always wants you in a hurry.
And the motorcycle — my motorcycle — became the place where all of this takes shape.
Why the motorcycle
You don’t need to ride a motorcycle to understand what I write here.
But if you’re curious: when you’re on a bike, you can’t do anything else. You can’t check your phone. You can’t think about tomorrow’s meeting. You can’t be somewhere else.
You’re there, on the road, with the wind reminding you that you exist.
The roads I choose are slow ones — not motorways, not optimised routes. The ones that climb, that wind, that pass through empty town centres at eight in the morning. The ones where you stop not because you’ve arrived, but because there’s something beautiful worth looking at.
It’s an act of resistance, in the end. Against time that tightens, against the usefulness of everything, against the idea that arriving quickly is a value.
Who I write for
I write for those who ride and recognise this feeling.
But I also write for those who have never touched a handlebar and yet, reading these words, felt something. For those who on Sunday morning would truly like to switch off, but don’t know how. For those who have everything they need to be happy and still feel something is missing. For those who have lost someone and understood, as I did, that time is the only thing you can never get back.
I have no recipes. No solutions. Just roads, and the time I take to travel them.
And every now and then, something worth telling.
Work? Yes, of course
I’m not a monk. I have a job. I have responsibilities. I have my worries.
I won’t tell you to drop everything and leave — that would be dishonest. A level head matters. A sense of responsibility matters.
But it shouldn’t stop us at every uncertainty. It shouldn’t be the only lens through which we see our lives.
The point isn’t to stop running forever. It’s to learn to choose when to run and when to stop. And to truly stop — not with guilt, not thinking about what you’re losing. With the awareness of what you’re gaining.
Where to find me
On Instagram I’m @slow_downnow — photos, roads, the occasional short reflection.
If you’d like to write to me, you can do so from here. I reply to everyone, slowly. Especially slowly.
“The road is in no hurry to end.”
— Slow