The Urgency, the Moment, the Choice
That day I pulled over for no particular reason.
Engine off, helmet still on, hands resting on the handlebars. There was nothing remarkable in front of me — a low stone wall, dry grass slowly regaining color after winter, and my shadow on the asphalt. Long, stretched by the late afternoon light, larger than me.
The sun was going down. Not in a hurry — the sun is never in a hurry. But it was going down.
I looked at that shadow and thought about something trivial: the phone call I still hadn’t made. One of those things you put off — not because you don’t care, but because there’s always a better moment than now. Later. When I have a minute. When I’m home. When I’m less tired.
The thing about later is that it always works. It’s an answer that costs nothing in the moment you give it — and one that usually never comes due. At least not right away.
The ordinary things you postpone and nothing happens. Coffee with a friend. A walk you’ve had in mind for weeks. That series you want to watch with your partner but you always end up doing something else. Small things that seem to resist time, that seem to wait for you.
But some don’t wait.
And some — and here you have to be fully honest — don’t wait in the most definitive sense there is. That thing you need to say to that person: if you wait for the right moment, there might come a day when the right moment no longer exists. Not because the person has gone far away. For any other reason. Irreparable is a big word, but sometimes it’s the only right one.
Later, in certain cases, isn’t laziness. It’s a risk we’re not calculating.
A trip you’ve had in mind for years. A conversation you kept putting off because you couldn’t find the right words — convinced that the right words would come on their own, sooner or later. A person you’re neglecting with the best intentions in the world. Later. Later. Later.
Sometimes later becomes next week. Sometimes it becomes next month. And sometimes — without you noticing, without a precise moment when everything changes — the later that becomes never arrives without warning.
It’s not a tragedy. It’s something quieter, and perhaps for that reason harder to recognize.
A motorcycle doesn’t have a pause button.
You either start it or you don’t. There’s no perfect condition for leaving — no day when the weather is ideal, the traffic is zero, your legs are fresh and your head is clear. If you wait for that, you never leave. You learn quickly, on a motorcycle, that the right moment is this one — whatever moment this happens to be.
You don’t think it. You feel it. Hands on the handlebars, road ahead, the wind deciding the temperature of the air on its own.
It’s a physical lesson. It enters the body before it reaches the mind.
But you don’t need a motorcycle to understand it. Anyone who has ever put off something important understands it — and then found themselves reckoning with that choice, not dramatically, but quietly and definitively. That window has closed. That person has changed. That moment won’t come back in the same form.
This isn’t a conversation about death. It’s a conversation about now.
In the end I took off my helmet. Pulled out my phone. Called — the kind of call you put off even with your closest friend
I didn’t have the right words — I never do, actually. We talked for twenty minutes about ordinary things, we laughed, we said we’d see each other soon.
In the moment it didn’t seem like anything special.
But I have to be honest: that phone call didn’t cure me of anything.
I still put things off. Ordinary things and important ones, aware of doing it, aware that often it’s just laziness — not fear, not lack of time. Laziness. Sometimes it’s simply that, and there’s no need to find a more noble explanation.
But I also know something else: that I’m working on it. That that afternoon on the side of the road, with the long shadows and the phone in my hand, something shifted by a millimeter. And a millimeter, over time, matters.
The shadow was still there, on the wall, on the edge of the road. But the sun had gone down a little more. And I had stopped waiting for it to go down at a better hour.
Slow down. Look around. Breathe.