A reflection from a coastal cycling tour through India
There’s a particular kind of silence you find on a coastal road early in the morning – before the fishing boats go out, before the heat settles in, when the only sound is your tires on wet tarmac and the sea breathing somewhere just out of sight. I’ve been chasing that silence for days now, thinking I was chasing distance. Kilometers logged, villages and towns crossed off, a finish line somewhere further North. But somewhere between the backwaters and the temple towns, I realized the math was wrong. This trip was never really about the distance.
I keep thinking about that quote — “What you seek is seeking you.”
I used to read it as something poetic and a little abstract, the kind of thing you nod at without really feeling it. But out here, it’s stopped being abstract. It happened in small, specific ways. The old fisherman who waved me in for chai without either of us saying much, because some hospitality doesn’t need language. The sudden monsoon shower that soaked me completely and somehow felt like a blessing instead of an inconvenience. The stretch of empty beach at dawn that I didn’t plan to stop at, but stopped at anyway, because something about the light made it impossible to keep riding.
None of that was on my route plan. I didn’t seek it out. Not directly. But it found me anyway, at exactly the moment I needed it, as if the coast knew something about my pace and my mood before I did.
I think that’s the real shape of a journey like this. About life. You set out looking for scenery, or fitness, or solitude, or whatever story you told yourself or goal you set before you started. And the road and life gives you that, sure. But it also gives you the things you didn’t know to ask for – the encounters, the weather, the stillness. Somehow those end up mattering more than anything you planned.
So maybe seeking isn’t just an act of chasing something forward. Maybe it’s also a kind of opening , a willingness to be met. The horizon doesn’t just wait at the end of the road. It moves toward you, a little, every single day, if you’re paying enough attention to notice.
It's never too late 