(Finally) on the road again…
I’m on my motorbike, heading towards Italy for a week of off-road riding in the Dolomites. The original plan had to change, but I still needed time away from daily life in Haarlem. Lately, people had been getting under my skin — unreliable, rude, or just irritating — and I’m not proud to admit it had made me short-fused. I’d started leaving the house less and less.
It’s been a year (minus one week) since I last left the country. I can’t remember a stretch this long without a break from my city, my country, my life.
I have eight days to reach the starting point. I’m on day four now. Somewhere over the last two days, I noticed the tension in my body start to ease. On the bike, during those 4–5 hour rides, my head is quiet. The few thoughts I do have get caught by the wind and slip out of my helmet as quickly as they arrive.
It hits me how much I’ve been exhausting myself — turning over worries about money, work, purpose, projects, and the invisible rules I thought I had to live by: be agreeable, be reliable, be friendly at all costs. The helmet, the earplugs, and the steady purr of the engine dissolve all that.
The first nights I camped, and the ritual of parking the bike, unpacking the tent, laying out the sleeping gear — each step in its place — felt almost meditative.
Last night I booked an Airbnb. Rain is on its way, so today I’ll either wander the city or sit in the kitchen tapping these words into my phone. I didn’t bring my laptop, no cameras, nothing.
Sometimes a flicker of anxiety comes back — the old reflex to think about work, projects, and money. Then I remember: I can’t do anything about it for the next few weeks. I’m away, unreachable. And for some reason, that makes it easy to let go.
Maybe that’s the real difference right now — the movement. Back home, I can meditate for twenty minutes in the evening, feel perfectly calm, sleep like a log… and then wake up the next day ready to be annoyed all over again. Out here, the movement doesn’t give my brain the chance to reload.
On the bike, there’s no inbox. No quiet pressure to reply politely, no mental performance review running in the background. Just the next bend in the road, the weight shift of my body, and the occasional bug hitting my visor hard enough to make me flinch.
I used to think presence was about stillness. Now I’m starting to suspect it’s also about distraction in the right direction — one that gets you out of your head without asking you to become a better person first.
Maybe when I get back, people will still be just as unreliable, rude, or irritating. But with a bit of luck, I’ll be less of a powder keg about it. For now, the engine is running, the road is open, and the wind is doing an excellent job of stealing my thoughts before I can make a mess of them.
