I decided to put this on my blog, perhaps writing a series of episodes or chapters about how the bicycle has accompanied me throughout my life. This is the first one. What title could I give it?
I don’t remember exactly how things happened. I was five, perhaps six years old. The outlines are blurred, but the body isn’t. The body remembers very well.
It remembers a small bicycle, held tightly as you hold something you don’t want to lose. It remembers hands on the handlebars, arms slightly stretched, the body leaning forward. Above all, it remembers a continuous stream of sensations: movement, speed, air on my face, my breathing getting faster without yet being called effort. There was a simple, immediate sense of physical wellbeing that came with every turn of the pedals.
I rode around the house, through the garden, across the courtyard, along the pavement at the back. My father had built wooden ramps connecting the different spaces, as though everything had been designed especially to let me ride around and around without ever stopping. The bends became faster and faster. Every lap was a little more daring than the one before.
I wasn’t thinking. The body anticipated. It saw before the eyes, heard before the ears. It leaned by itself, braked at the last moment, accelerated whenever it could. The bicycle stopped being an object: it became a natural extension, a continuation of the body, as though I had grown a third joint made of wheels and frame.
In those moments, the body felt good. Very good. And that feeling never stayed still. It always pushed the limit a little further. Not as a challenge, not to prove anything, but simply for the pleasure of discovering what would happen next. Holding on for a few more seconds when the legs began to burn. Entering a bend a little faster. Trusting.
Whatever was actually happening between body, mind and the space around me was creating a primal balance, a silent dialogue. There I learned something I have never unlearned: the body knows. It knows how to be. It knows when to push and when to stop. And if you listen to it, it doesn’t lie.
Sometimes, though, that trust went a little too far.
A fall never comes when you’re standing still. It always comes when you’re moving, when something is working. I remember a descent. I still know that road today, and every time I pass it my body notices before I do. It’s one of those descents that seem endless when you’re a child: bends following one another, speed increasing without asking permission, the sound of the wheels changing as the tarmac moves faster beneath them.
I was with my father. I don’t remember whether he said anything to me beforehand. But I was already inside the descent, inside that absolute concentration that leaves no room for words. There was only the line through the bend, the breath, the body trying to find the balance between braking and courage.
At the fourth bend, I didn’t turn.
I went straight on.
It wasn’t a decision. It was a fraction of a second in which the body misjudged things. Too much speed, too little margin. The bicycle stopped following the road and I followed it off. I remember time stretching, the sudden silence after all the noise, being on the ground.
A fall is a suspension. For a moment everything stops: the game, the movement, the illusion of control. You’re there on the ground and the body makes a quick inventory: bones, skin, breath. Are you still in one piece? Yes. Then you can get up.
That was a fundamental lesson. Not because I hurt myself, but because I understood that falling is not the opposite of movement. It is part of it. It is the price of going further, of trying, of trusting a little too much. There were other falls: into a small wall at the end of a ramp, into a fence outside the gate of our house, one leaving me with a scar that I can still find today if I look for it. Every time the same pattern: push a little further, get it wrong, pay the price, learn.
The bicycle never taught me how to avoid falling. It taught me how to fall. To fall without unnecessary drama. To distinguish between fear and attention. To understand that a limit is not an enemy, but a moving line that we continually negotiate with. Falling also meant getting back up without excuses, looking at the bend, understanding what had happened and starting again. Perhaps a little more slowly. Perhaps with a new sense of measure.
And continuing.
With time, continuing took on another name.
Effort cannot be explained. It has to be crossed. And the bicycle taught me that very early. I don’t remember the first time I thought, “It’s too much.” But I remember very well the first time I continued despite that thought. At first, effort didn’t yet have a name. It was a general sensation: burning legs, shortness of breath, a new slowness creeping into my movements. But together with that slowness came a quality of attention that I had never experienced before.
The climb towards the village above our house is one of the first places where this school opened its doors. I don’t remember the climb itself — the gradient, the bends, the distance — but I remember arriving. I remember my father and my uncles watching me arrive. I remember the body knowing that it had done something great, even though the mind didn’t yet have the words to describe it.
There, effort wasn’t suffering. It was achievement. It was the body discovering that it could endure longer than it thought.
With time, effort stopped being an extraordinary event and became a familiar companion. The body learned to recognise its signals: the point when the legs ask for a break, the point when the breath loses its rhythm, and the more subtle point when the mind begins looking for excuses. And that is where the bicycle really teaches.
Because effort isn’t only muscular. It is mental. It is the voice that says “enough” before it really is enough. The bicycle doesn’t argue with that voice. It doesn’t silence it. It lets it speak… and then keeps pedalling.
I learned that effort has layers. There is a superficial, noisy kind of tiredness that arrives early and frightens us. And then there is another, deeper and quieter kind that only arrives if you stay. If you don’t run away. If you accept being there for a little longer. Staying with effort is an act of trust, not blind trust, but embodied trust.
With time I came to understand that the body is much wiser than the mind. It knows when it really needs to stop. It knows the difference between pointless pain and productive effort. The bicycle taught me to listen to this intelligence, not to force things but also not to give up too soon.
And it also taught me the other side: the effort that sets you free. After hours in the saddle, when the body is emptied and the mind stops producing noise, a simple, vast space remains. There, effort no longer weighs on you. It becomes silence. It becomes presence.
In those spaces I understood that effort isn’t only about becoming stronger. It is about becoming more real. It strips you down, removes what is unnecessary and leaves you with what really matters: the essential movement, the breath coming in and going out, the road ahead.
Perhaps that is where it all really began. In those first kilometres, when the body learned to trust, to fall, to stay. Since then, I have never stopped getting back on the bicycle, because I know that whatever happens, the body already knows the way.
In those first kilometres, at that age, I was simply learning to play the most beautiful game in the world: the game of life. I didn’t know it then. I just pedalled. But everything I was learning through the bicycle would later appear again, many times, in the days of my life.
I learned to trust. To trust the bicycle and, without realising it, to trust what came my way. Bends, descents, climbs, difficulties: the body was learning that they could be crossed. That not everything can be controlled, but much can be accompanied.
I learned to fall. Because in life, as on a bicycle, sometimes we fall. We misjudge things, we are disappointed, we wake up in the morning with little enthusiasm. When you fall off a bicycle, you can’t stay on the ground forever. You don’t put down roots in the fall. You get back up, brush off some of the dust, take care of the wounds and get back in the saddle. There is always another stretch of road to ride, another climb to face, another descent to enjoy.
And effort? What about effort? Where can we go in this life without encountering at least some of it? Effort has taught me more than any book. Not because life is only effort — it isn’t — but because, just like the road, not everything is flat. You learn to live with it, to know it, to make it a companion. Sometimes even to seek it out, not as a challenge, but out of love.
And so, without being conscious of it at all, I was learning to play. I was absorbing some fundamental rules that would help me later in life. I didn’t know it then. I did it because it made me feel good, because it made me feel alive. It made me smile when I looked at myself in the mirror. It allowed me to talk to grown-ups without feeling small, because I wasn’t small anymore.
Without making any noise, the bicycle was already teaching me how to be in the world.
