"Life is like riding a bicycle.
To keep your balance, you must keep moving."
Albert Einstein
I was cycling home instead of taking the train – I needed some fresh air and headspace from the increasing demands of work.
I didn’t want to go straight there as I knew I would still be stressed - so I took the longer towpath.
The first puddle I went through was annoying, by the second I didn’t care, by the third I was enjoying it. Getting muddy – laughing to myself, just having a little play.
I stopped at the pub I’ve never stopped at for a pint and just sat there, just thinking how simple it was to get this feeling of freedom - I was choosing what I wanted to do, where and for how long!
And as my worries shrunk to their rightful size, my day felt a little bit bigger and better…
THIS IS NOT A CYCLING BOOK
It is a book about how we can make life grow a bit bigger and better using one of the simplest tools ever invented.
Think of the book as an invitation to rediscover the joy and freedom many of us remember from childhood and that a richer, more interesting life is still within reach.
Cycling may have recently developed a reputation for being serious, technical and occasionally dangerous, but that image says far more about the way the activity has been presented than about the experience itself – as millions of cyclists will tell you.
This book is not about riding faster or further than anyone else. It is about what happens to your head, your body and your outlook on life when you spend more time moving through the real world under your own power.
It is for people who already cycle regularly and for people who have not sat on a bike for far too long, but who suspect that doing so again might just be a good thing.
WHY WE NEED THIS NOW
Most of us enter adult life believing our world will get bigger as we grow into it. We imagine travel, new relationships, interesting work and the gradual discovery of new possibilities, places and experiences. For a while that is exactly what happens, our lives do become genuinely larger.. but then slowly and almost without noticing, our world stops getting bigger.
Our responsibilities multiply as careers, families and mortgages appear. Days become organised around the things that we must do, rather than the things that we used to enjoy doing.
And the modern world now means an extraordinary amount of our life happens, literally without leaving the same chair – work, relationships and entertainment appear effortlessly on screens in front of our face. Entire days can pass while our mind travels everywhere except the physical world outside our front door.
If life really is a journey, this convenience is enabling us to spend all of it on a fast, straight-line motorway.
As our digital world constantly expands, our physical world is shrinking further and further. We spend more time living in our own heads, observing life rather than participating in it. We read about places rather than visiting them, we communicate constantly but by typing and reading and not by the richness of face-to-face encounters. Work follows us into every room of our home.
We are having fewer experiences and life is becoming less rich. Most of us know it, we feel it - our days lack moments of curiosity, spontaneity and discovery. Of fun and play even.
We are lacking the simple experience of doing things outside, in the real world and importantly without distraction. Moments when our minds and bodies are so engrossed in what we are doing that headspace appears as the problems that have been filling it appear less critical - and the recovered space allows us to enjoy living right in the present moment.
Moments that make us happier, more relaxed, nicer people to be around - because life regains its proper priorities and proportion - and that is why this book exists now.
What many of us need is simply a practical excuse to step back into the real world with something that moves our body and stops our mind from wandering to the distractions that prevent us from enjoying the present moment
For reasons that will be both obvious and maybe surprising, a bicycle turns out to be the simplest way of doing exactly that.
WHY A BIKE
Almost everyone who has ever ridden a bicycle knows this feeling...
You leave the house and begin moving under your own power, your body settles into a new rhythm and your mind follows. Within twenty minutes any noise in your head begins to clear as your focus is required for the world around you.
Within half an hour your body feels a little bit better and your world a little bit bigger.
This small transformation is one of the reasons bicycles have remained so popular for more than a century. Long before cycling became associated with racing teams, Lycra, expensive equipment and an aesthetic built around speed and suffering, the bicycle was simply a practical machine that allowed ordinary people to travel further than they could on foot. It connected people to each other and places they would otherwise never have seen, and it made movement cheap, independent and possible for almost anyone.
Across huge areas of Europe, Asia and Africa, millions of people still cycle to work, to school, to markets, to meet friends and family, to travel and occasionally to race each other – for fun! It is not treated as a sport or a way of identifying yourself. It is simply a cheap, reliable way of moving around the world.
In countries where Lycra cycle clothing is for sale, cycling’s image has been drifting away from this. From the outside it can appear a bit serious, expensive and slightly intimidating, but that image bears little resemblance to the experience most people actually have when they ride a bicycle.
Whether they are wearing Lycra or not, tens of millions around the world enjoy cycling so much that they do it again and again, riding for longer and longer.
Just thirty minutes can clear your head before the day runs away with you. A few hours can reset your mood before you go home. A whole day can remind you what living in the present actually feels like. A few days can restore your faith in people and in your own capability. Your world gets bigger and when your world gets bigger, your life tends to follow.
This book helps you use a bike to make the most of these possibilities.
You don’t need to make a big commitment or plan a big adventure. We all live busy lives, so let’s start with the simple, practical question.
How long have you got?
MY STORY
It wasn’t until recently, being older and reflecting, that I have really appreciated how much bigger and better my life has been due to the simple fact of riding my bike to get me places – from the local park for a clearer head, to Mount Everest for a genuine experience of freedom.
On this journey of life, I certainly haven’t taken the convenient motorway route, but the slower, slightly hilly at times, scenic road, less travelled.
I started riding, like many, when I was young – because it gave me everything – self-esteem, confidence and friendship
I wasn’t a good student, and I wasn’t particularly good at sport either - so I certainly wasn’t invited to be one of the in-crowd, but finding some other uncool outliers who liked riding brought us together. it was a tool through which we could all feel friendship.
I wasn’t talented on a bike either though - my early memories involve a lot of fairly daft accidents. Riding straight into the back of a parked car because I was too busy talking instead of looking where I was going (as I had been instructed to always do). I crossed roads I had promised my mum I wouldn’t cross. I tried to carry an Action Man under one arm while steering with the other, fell off, and still have the brake lever scar on my thigh to match the one on the cheek of my toy soldier.
But – what I was good at, was inventing reasons to ride somewhere - and that’s what gave me a reason to belong in the group and at the same time make my tiny world a bit bigger.
We’d go en masse to an away football match of our village team, to the rumoured best record shop in the next town, to a field with a tent and no real plan, beyond not dying or to the local airfield to see a famous singer’s plane.
Riding made my teenage years livable and even fun.
But then adulthood came along, college, work, more work, mortgage, family. I worked hard and built businesses that did well. I married someone brilliant and we had four children who filled the house and most of my calendar.
From the outside, I appeared happy and successful but inside, I felt permanently rushed and anxious. In midlife I realised I really wasn’t enjoying everything as much as I hoped I would be. I felt like I lived in the suburbs of my own life, not in the centre – where I wanted to be.
So, I went back to what got me through my teens, I bought a bike – to help me get back to the centre of my own life.
I just wanted something physical to do that didn’t involve a screen. I began with short rides to work, which progressed to little detours on the way home. I’d leave work tightly coiled and distracted and come back calmer and clearer. I felt better, having something other than work and home in my life – a third space - that could be as big as I wanted it to be.
I kept going, so it got very big.
I persuaded a few friends to join me and discovered that, exactly like childhood, the shared physical effort brought us closer together – with the bonus of a few relaxing pints at the end of the route. Pushing myself physically made the rest of life feel less stressful.
The distances grew and as they did, my world expanded with them, physically at first but also mentally – I became more confident, kinder, more empathetic. I became a better version of myself – the version I wished I could always be.
My confidence built and I rode across Britain, then Europe, then Australia and India and numerous other far away towns that people told me were unsafe, but I was always met with kindness. I rode across the Rockies and the Alps and later found myself sitting at Everest Base Camp with the same bike beside me, aware of how far that unconfident boy had travelled – in body, mind and spirit.
Riding brought me back to my real self in the most natural and simplest way possible.
Whether I’ve got just thirty minutes or occasionally enough time to cycle around a little more of the world, I continue to ride and my life continues to be bigger and better than it would otherwise be.
HOW LONG HAVE YOU GOT?
Thirty minutes for headspace
A few hours for freedom
A whole day for friendship
A couple of days for trust
Time to go abroad for confidence
Time to see the world for meaning
THIRTY MINUTES
Just thirty minutes riding can give you what you need
It’s enough time to step away from the noise in your head
Enough time for your shoulders to relax and your thoughts to slow down.
You don’t escape anything.
You simply cycle away from it for a little while.
Cycling gives your body something else to do
And your head something else to think about.
When you come back, the day is still the same.
Except now you have it in proportion
FOR HEADSPACE
WHAT YOU NEED
A bike that works
Ideally a helmet
That’s it
START
The first ride that could change your life
We feel we are so judged these days that we won’t do anything unless we make it perfect before we even start. That is physically impossible but that’s what stops so many of us living the life we could live.
We are too scared of what other people think if we’re not able to achieve an impossibility.
So, we often take something simple and surround it with research, comparison, equipment, hesitation, imagined complications and the feeling that we should probably sort a few other things out first.
We do anything we can think of to stop us doing the actual thing. We procrastinate.
Is the bike is good enough? Do you need padded shorts? Are the roads too busy? should you get fitter first? is there any point if you only have half an hour? Isn’t it too embarrassing to be someone of your age wobbling about after not having ridden for years?
That is a lot of thought for something that can literally begin with just sitting on a bicycle and pedaling away from your front door.
Most of the time, the barrier is not cycling. It is overthinking.
You will not start perfectly. You will not have a perfect route, or the perfect kind of bag attached to the perfect kind of handlebars. You do not need to know much about your bike. You do not need to commit to becoming the sort of person who talks about the perfect tyre pressure over the perfect coffee.
You don’t have to commit to anything at all;
you just need to do one short ride.
Round the block is enough, so is to the shops, to the coffee shop and back, along the towpath. The point is not to impress anyone but simply to begin. Once you do, the rest will take care of itself.
You’ll realise what might make the next ride better. Maybe you pump the tyres up, put a light on the bike, wear a different jacket or discover a quieter road two streets away.
This is how every person riding a bike in the world started - scrappily and simply finding they enjoyed it enough to want to do it again.
The perfect moment does not exist, so just start as you are.
If you are unfit, start unfit.
If you are busy, start busy.
If you are doubtful, start doubtful.
But if it’s raining, wait for it to stop!
Do not set yourself any targets and turn a simple activity into another thing by which to judge yourself.
Simply go for a ride and see how you feel.
That’s it.
If you enjoyed it, you will naturally find the time to do it again.
HEADSPACE
The simple rides that clear your head
Sometime soon after cycling out of your street, having to concentrate fully on what you’re doing and finding your rhythm, you will find your mind moves down a notch from top gear.
Your shoulders start to drop because you can think straight. The day is no longer clogging up the inside of your head.
Nothing has changed, except for your internal commentary - a running list of tasks, the replay of that misunderstood email exchange, the background sense that you should be somewhere else, doing something more productive. All you do is ride away from it for a short while and it all starts to sound distant and quieter and some space naturally returns inside your head.
I didn’t start riding in adulthood for my mental health. I didn’t look at myself in the mirror and then buy a bike like a well‑behaved modern adult. I started riding because I needed to get out of the house before I became too much of an unpleasant person to live with.
It worked, but what made the difference to my life was how consistent that effect was.
We live in a world that wants you managing yourself at all times - optimising your mornings, tracking your sleep score, changing your habits, improving your mindset and ultimately always aiming to become a better version of you.
Preferably while also monetising a side hustle and hitting your step count.
It all appears useful but instead often creates a background pressure, that eventually takes its toll and if you believe your willpower has failed you, where others all seem to have succeeded, it leaves you feeling anxious, flat and not as nice to your loved ones as you know you should be.
Cycling doesn’t need willpower or optimisation or tracking - It simply offers the best tool to remove yourself from the pressure by fully engrossing your mind and body in doing something else, outside, in real life.
Even just thirty minutes offers relief from the modern world.
When you’re moving at cycling speed, you can’t be in ten places at the same time. You can’t be replying to messages and being present. You can’t be “catching up” while pretending to relax.
When I run, I can still find myself mulling over the problems I was trying to leave behind, but on my bike, I have no choice but to use all my mind on getting somewhere whilst avoiding things – potholes, pedestrians and parked cars mainly.
It’s just simple common sense. Cycling engages your whole body. All your senses are required. Your complete attention is required here, rather than in its usual loop of distracted worry, comparison and judgement.
A short bike ride can reset your head for the day and for most of us, that’s where feeling better really begins.
GOOD HEALTH
The rides that coincidentally build fitness
Cycling anywhere is exercise - to the coffee shop, to see a friend or simply to work.
Anywhere you ride, your legs work. Your lungs work. Your heart has to get involved whether it likes it or not. You burn energy.
But the main thing is you go somewhere, and that makes a difference, not just to your body, but to your head too.
You haven’t got to procrastinate until you hate the amount of time you’ve wasted enough to put on your gym kit or running shoes and leave the house. You just use your bike to go somewhere you have to go. That’s it, the exercise happens on the way.
When I used to cycle across London, I deliberately rode the cheapest, heaviest bikes I could find. One of them cost less than an evening in the pub. Another was my wife’s, embarrassingly way too small for me, but I persisted until a few years later it collapsed under my weight in the middle of Soho.
I looked ridiculous, I didn’t care, because riding them turned my commute into a small workout and I arrived at work already awake, already exercised and already having achieved something worthwhile with my day before most people had opened their inbox.
Your day still feels very different if you start it scrolling through your phone or start it having physically moved yourself somewhere else. One leaves you feeling stuck in the mundane, the other leaves you alert.
According to the health professionals regular moderate cycling improves cardiovascular health, reduces blood pressure and lowers the risk of heart disease and type 2 diabetes. It also improves your sleep, without you having to track it and It’s one of the few exercises you can sustain well into older age because it’s low-impact and kind to joints.
It saved me money and made me fitter, but it also improved my motivation on the mundane days.
When you move from “I should go to the gym” to “I cycled here.” the psychological shift is enormous. You stop treating exercise as an extra task and it just becomes part of how you live more healthily.
You don’t need to count kilometres, buy an expensive bike, track your heart rate… or eat energy bars – my diet, even when I was racing on my bike, was made up entirely of our four kid’s leftovers – four half eaten dinners and the scraps of four puddings!
When you ride often, you stop obsessing over your body shape – and what you’ve eaten, because you’re doing something with it. Instead, you start treating your body as a vehicle to just enjoy life with. And once that relationship improves your confidence, even slightly, the rest of life becomes a little bit easier to face.
You don’t need to ride many times for it to feel natural to move your body, as part of your daily life - and like your bike, it works better and lasts longer if it’s looked after and used often.
You’ve been outside, travelling under your own steam, likely eaten a bit more of what you like and made a mundane day feel better – what’s not to like?
And that’s why cycling provides the best tool to ‘stay in shape’ – both mentally and physically.
Ten Good Reasons to Ride for Thirty Minutes
• To clear your head between meetings
• To wake yourself up properly
• To get to the coffee shop instead of scrolling at home
• To remind yourself you are not stuck
• To arrive somewhere under your own power
• To interrupt a bad mood
• To turn a flat day into a better one
• To feel the weather
• To remember your legs still work
• Because you can
A FEW HOURS
A few hours riding can change your whole day.
Thirty minutes clears your head.
A few hours become a micro-adventure
What begins as an ordinary day becomes one that ends with stories
You can ride somewhere you have never been before.
Or just ride to the café and spend longer there!
Your day started as routine.
But it finishes with a new memory
FOR FREEDOM
WHAT EXTRA YOU NEED
The same bike
A lock
A pump
Some water
Money for coffee
A puncture repair kit
FREEDOM
The rides where you escape your constraints
Adult life seems to be mostly made up of demands on your time.
Can you do Tuesday?
Can you send that by five?
Parents’ evening is at six.
Call at seven?
Reply when you can.
Even when absolutely nothing is urgent, everything feels like it is. You move from one obligation to the next, rarely at a pace of your choosing, mostly just reacting. After a while you stop noticing the subtle demands your days are prioritised by, meetings, expectations, requirements. You are someone’s colleague, someone’s parent, someone’s partner, someone’s problem‑solver. It all matters, but boy, does it all accumulate, fast.
Then you go for a ride, and, for a couple of hours you get to choose what you want to do with your own time.
Just start moving away, and suddenly your time, your life is yours again. You get to choose exactly where you want to go, exactly how long you want to spend there, whether you want to read a book or do absolutely nothing and exactly how much cake you are going to eat while doing that.
No one knowing where you are or expecting you anywhere at a particular time is not a small thing, in this day and age its absolute freedom.
For many years, with four children and a growing business, I lived tightly bound by these constraints. Staff, clients, payroll, school runs, you could see it in my face – not happy - while my mind had to solve tomorrow’s work problem, even while I was still reading “with” my children.
I discovered that a couple of hours out on a bike restored my priorities and the right proportion to my life. The thing that felt enormous at 8am often looked manageable by 11. Not because it vanished, but because I realised it wasn’t the most important thing in the world…and a reminder that it never should have been.
We are all constrained by demands on our time but a few hours riding gives us the freedom to put them in perspective - we’re not just here on earth to answer to everyone else.
Time for ourselves is one of the simplest pleasures in the world.
NATURE
The rides that reconnect you with the real world
You don’t have to cycle far to find enough nature to relight the senses. You don’t need much and there’s a bit around most corners.
In London, within ten minutes of leaving my office I can be riding along the River Thames towpath, with herons lifting off the water, reeds brushing my legs and the smell of damp earth under my tyres.
That not only feels good – it looks, smells and sounds good too. Nature is real life at its most basic level and we all need its restorative benefits.
A few minutes earlier I was stressed. The fact that instant change is possible and used regularly, tells you everything you need to know about how we live now.
Most of modern life is climate‑controlled. Light on. Heating on. Window shut. Temperature constant. Unless you make a little effort, you can spend days barely noticing the world outside.
In that environment we need nature in order to survive and thrive.
Jump on a bike and you instantly become part of that outside world. You feel rain as wet, the heat as hot. the smell of trees before you see them. The sight of a squirrel scuttling up a tree. You notice the seasons because you are in them – they happen to you.
And ride a bit more and you have the privilege of learning what humanity always had to do - live with the weather - early starts to dodge the heat of the midday sun, storms that arrive with no warning, dark clouds that make you change direction, early misty mornings and beautiful evening sunsets that dictate the time you ride.
There is nothing more grounding and better at connecting you with yourself and the world around you.
The same truth applies to the perfect ride and any grey Wednesday ride, anywhere. You are in the elements and not sat in a room oblivious to them.
It might sound idealistic but after a few hours riding in nature, I feel restored and properly alive - and I so benefit from that feeling – and as it lightens my mood - so do those around me.
Good Reasons to Ride for a Few Hours
• Along a river or canal you’ve never followed properly
• To a bakery you’d normally drive to
• To a town with a ridiculous name
• To lunch somewhere slightly inconvenient
• With one other person, side by side
• To the edge of the map you normally live inside
• In whatever direction the wind is blowing
A WHOLE DAY
A whole day riding feels like a small holiday.
You leave in the morning in no real rush.
You ride, stop, chat, eat, ride again.
If the effort is shared, you feel part of a team
With banter and natural silences.
Hours pass without any anyone watching the clock.
The road keeps going and the day keeps stretching.
By the time you return home
you have spent an entire day somewhere else.
And you arrive back with strengthened friendship and a quiet glow.
FOR FRIENDSHIP
WHAT EXTRA YOU NEED
bike lights
Some snacks
Clothing for the weather
Whatever cycle clothes you want to wear
BEING THERE
The rides that slow time down
Life can disappear very quickly, normally while we’re busy being distracted by something unimportant.
It’s all too easy to be both physically present and mentally elsewhere. You tell yourself you’re busy for good reasons. You’re providing. You’re building. You’re sorting things out. All true but while you’re busy, the life you want to live just carries on without you.
One day you look up and the child you coaxed on their first bike ride is suddenly cycling to the pub with their friends. Videos from ten years ago feel both ancient and ‘like yesterday’. You’re shocked that’s it’s a lot longer than you thought - and by how quickly the time in-between has just disappeared.
Riding with someone changes the quality of your attention.
You can’t be somewhere else while you’re riding with others. You cannot dwell on yesterday’s meeting or already be worrying about tomorrow’s while you’re already talking to someone else and working out what turning you should both be taking next.
There’s a limit to multi-tasking.
You are either on a ride, or you aren’t on a ride.
I really learned this properly while cycling with my daughter to a chip shop twenty‑five miles away because a pop star she loved had once been there. That was the entire justification. It sounded childish but that is often the very best reason for a good ride.
We didn’t need special kit or a plan. We just packed snacks, a rough route, and the willingness to let the day take as long as it took. She rode with complete commitment - no bargaining, no negotiating, no adult worries about yesterday or tomorrow. Halfway up a hill a serious‑looking rider passed and said, “I struggle on this one.” She beamed for the rest of the ride.
We were on an adventure, father and daughter together, just the two of us.
When we got to the chip shop she stood still and took it all in properly - the sign, the smell, the exact spot he stood.
That day was never about chips or cycling a long way. It was about me being fully there, helping her do something that mattered to her, on her terms, without me being half on my phone, half thinking of something else and really only half there.
On the ride home I felt guilty about how rarely I made moments like this happen, no screens, no agenda, no rush, just shared effort and a shared story to tell.
Riding with others for a day gives you something a few hours can’t, this genuine unrushed presence. It forces you into being properly there and so accordingly you take more of it in - and that is how time appears to slow down – each minute has a memory associated with it, rather than rushing through a day with nothing to take from it.
Providing for others obviously matters, but being there for them matters more.
BEING TOGETHER
The rides where you meet like-minded souls
I never set out to “find my tribe”, I just wanted to try cycling with other people.
But as I started heading out on rides with others, I discovered that the usual social labels quickly become totally irrelevant. Nobody cares what you do for a living and nobody’s impressed by your job title. It’s purely about how you show up as a human being in an activity that takes shared effort and consideration of others.
Riding in a group or with a club you see each other when you’re on top form but also when you’re tired, hungry and slightly grumpy. Are you and they still willing to take a turn riding at the front of the group, still happy to wait at the top for the others, still happy to share whatever snack is left.
And because you’re doing something mildly difficult together, it accelerates the getting-to-know-you period. Strangers become friends much faster sitting on bikes, than across tables.
There are conversations people will have on a bike that they would never have while sitting across a table. I don’t know whether it’s the shared effort, or the fact that when you’re riding side by side, you’re looking in the same direction rather than directly at each other’s eyes, but something opens up.
We’d start by talking about where we were going on the bike and finish by having the same conversations about our entire life.
I found myself being a much better person on a weekend ride than I was on weekdays in the office. It’s easier to just be your real self, when your living in the moment.
Those weekend rides became a weekly reset I didn’t know I needed - We’d ride, stop, eat too much cake, talk, share, laugh, solve none of our problems but somehow return home better equipped to handle them.
In a world where connection is often filtered and transactional, belonging like that feels more genuine. It’s not about performance or networking, it’s simply people travelling through life in the same direction for a while.
It’s a physical reminder we’re not doing life on our own.
PLAY
The rides that make you feel young again
Somewhere along the way, it was somehow decided that adult life has to be constantly productive. Even doing something silly has to be “good for you” now or at the very least instagrammable.
The rides I remember most fondly have almost never been productive or at all impressive. They’ve normally been stupidly silly and taken on with childlike zeal.
A lot of them have been on a mountain bike with my friend Bill. From riding routes out of London through only forest paths - where we simply have to make sure we don’t crash into trees or come to a dead stop in the middle of a very deep puddle – to cycling over The Rockies or The Alps on the same bikes, very foolishly convinced if we could do it around London, we could do it over the biggest mountains on earth. Laughing at the stupidity of our thinking and each other, like kids.
When the first of our four children went to university in Bath - conveniently a hundred miles away – it was the perfect reason to ride somewhere for fun. Then it became Bournemouth. Then Leeds. Then Manchester. At some point I became suspicious my children were deliberately choosing distant universities purely to stop me having a laugh from being the embarrassing dad turning up in Lycra.
One weekend a group of us rode around the whole of London on the roads closest to the M25 motorway. Officially grey, noisy & completely pointless but it turned into one of the best days we’d had in years. Mainly because we were doing something for no good reason, that actually turned out to be a lot better than expected.
My favourite rides now are when we check the weather forecast and just go in whatever direction the wind is blowing, purely because it will make us go really fast. We convince ourselves we’re as fit as our younger selves and then get on a train for the journey back home, deeply satisfied with our entirely unearned brilliance.
This is simple unadulterated, uncompromising play.
And making time for play matters because adult life squeezes it out of us.
There are so many different reasons to ride a bike but one of the best is the legitimate excuse it gives you to behave like a teenager, with too much confidence, zero responsibilities, and imaginary missions. You get home tired, relaxed - and lighter, simply because you’ve been outside, playing for a while.
You don’t stop playing because you age. You age because you stop playing.
Good Reasons to Ride All Day
• To the sea
• To another city
• To a stadium you’ve only seen on television
• To the best café you’ve heard rumours about
• To get lost on purpose
• To take the train out and ride back
• To remember the day in detail next week
