The Old Man's Bicycle

There is an old man in my neighbourhood who cycles to the market every morning on a bicycle that must be sixty years old. The frame is black. The saddle is leather, cracked, moulded to him. The bell has a small dent. He is eighty-one and he rides slowly, upright, in a shirt and a flat cap, with a wicker basket on the front and a length of twine looped around the handlebar in case something needs tying.

I am forty-two. I own a bicycle that cost more than his has cost across its whole life. It is carbon, matte black, aerodynamic. I have a helmet with vents in it. I have shoes that clip to the pedals. I have an app that records my average speed to two decimal places.

For a while, we happened to overlap on the same stretch of road. I would come up behind him, ring my bell politely, and pass him. He would nod. I would arrive at the market feeling I had won something, though he had not, at any point, been racing me.

One morning I was tired and did not overtake. I stayed behind him. I watched him for the length of the road, which is about two kilometres. And I noticed something I had not noticed before.

He never stopped. That was the whole trick. He never had to stop.

I stop constantly. At the light on the corner because I have arrived just as it turns red. At the pothole outside the school because I have been going too fast to swerve. At the crossing because I have not made eye contact with the driver in time. At the top of the small hill because my heart is pounding and I want to enjoy a breath before I coast down. Between the pothole and the market I probably stop nine times. I move quickly and I stop often.

He moves slowly and he does not stop. He arrives at the light exactly as it turns green. He passes the pothole at a speed that lets him steer around it without thinking. He nods at the driver at the crossing a full three seconds before he reaches it, and the driver waves him through. He climbs the small hill in the same gear he has been in all morning, breathing evenly, and coasts down the other side. He does not have my average speed. He beats me to the market by four minutes.

I have thought about this a lot. There is a version of life that looks like his bicycle and a version that looks like mine. Mine sprints and stops and sprints and stops. His moves at a pace that never needs to stop. Mine feels fast to me. His arrives sooner.

You can call this a metaphor about work, or ageing, or ambition, and you would be right about all of them, but I don't want to reach for the metaphor too quickly. I want to sit with the literal fact of the old man on the black bicycle first.

He has been riding to this market for probably fifty years. He knows every pothole. He knows every light. He knows which driver at which crossing is polite and which one you have to make eye contact with. He is not fast. He is fluent. Fluency, in almost any part of life, is the thing that lets you not stop. And fluency is not bought. It is deposited, slowly, over years, in a wicker basket at the front of a bicycle.

I have started slowing down on that road. I have started nodding at drivers earlier. I have started noticing potholes before I need to swerve. I am not, yet, as quick as the old man. But I am learning, slowly, what he is teaching, which is that hurry is what slow people do when they have not yet learned how to move.