This evening I was sitting in Ranco. Sometimes the moment you know arrives quietly, without warning. On the same lakeside where last spring fifty-four of us gathered for the Royal ride. Same terrace, same view. But it was a different evening.
My wife was with me. Just an aperitivo, nothing special: a Sbagliato for me, an iced tea for her — the ice clinking in the glass each time she moved it. A toasted sandwich cut in two, on the table between us. Around us, the gentle noise of a lakeside bar — voices, a thread of low music, the muffled sound of small motorboats on the water. An unusually cool breeze for June, and a sun that was warm in just the right way.
And I felt perfectly at ease.
I wasn’t thinking about anything urgent. I wasn’t looking at my phone. I was watching the lake, and I realized — with an almost unexpected clarity — that this is what I want. Not as a consolation. Not as a fallback. As a choice.
There comes a point in life — if you’re lucky, and if you’re paying attention — when you understand the difference between what you wanted because you expected it of yourself, and what you actually want. It’s not a revelation. It doesn’t arrive all at once. It comes through accumulation, through subtraction, through small renunciations that turn out, over time, to be liberations.
For me it’s been a long stretch. Getting married. Deciding to slow down. Discovering — genuinely, not rhetorically — that I’m capable of things I didn’t expect from myself: writing, for instance. Keeping a blog. Sitting down to build something slow, in a world that rushes.
And then there are the people. A few is enough. The ones you think of when something good happens, and the ones you call when something goes wrong. Some I’ve known forever — old friends I love in a visceral way, with that kind of familiarity that needs no explanation. And some arrived recently — like the one who shares his name with a wine — and found a permanent place almost immediately. I can’t explain it better than this: there are people you enjoy being with, and people you feel at ease with. The first group can be large. The second, very small. I’ve stopped chasing the first and started taking care of the second.
And then there was the motorcycle.
For years I rode powerful bikes. Not because I didn’t love them — I genuinely did. But there was something constructed about that pleasure, something that had more to do with who I thought I was supposed to be than with who I actually was. I had spent years living a role — the enthusiast who never goes below a certain displacement, who knows the names, who recognizes the sound. A part I thought others expected of me. Maybe I expected it of myself too. Then one day I took out the Royal Enfield and understood that this was the feeling I had been looking for all along. Not speed. Not horsepower. Rhythm. The sensation of the road beneath me. The way a slow corner asks you to truly be there, instead of just passing through. I stopped performing. I started riding.
I haven’t stopped appreciating powerful motorcycles. I’ve just stopped needing them.
It’s a small distinction. For me it was enormous.
I think many of us — myself first — spend years building a version of ourselves that’s acceptable to others. A role. A recognizable identity. Something that says: this is who I am, you can expect this from me. And we work at it, we push ourselves, we tend to that version with almost obsessive care. Until the day we stop — maybe on a terrace by the lake, a glass in hand — and we realize that version wasn’t quite true. That underneath there was something quieter, simpler, more yours. And that it had been waiting all along, for you to stop making noise long enough to hear it.
Real wellbeing — the moment you know it — I’ve discovered, isn’t about arriving somewhere. It’s about stopping pretending to be something you’re not. It’s the moment when what you choose and what you want finally align. When slowing down is not surrender but a conscious preference. When an iced tea by the lake is worth more than a thousand noisy evenings. When the ice clinking in a glass, the sun warm in just the right way, and someone beside you who needs no words are, simply, enough.
You don’t have to get there on a motorcycle. You can get there anywhere. But it helps to have something that forces you to stay in the moment — something that won’t forgive distraction.
For me, that thing is my slow bike.
Slow down. Look around. Breathe.