There’s a moment that returns to me, the wheels of my bike turning beneath the weight of everything I carry. Not the physical load—the water bottles, the meticulous engineering of carbon and bits of steel, the grams of weight I’ve slowly put on over time—but the accumulated heaviness of weeks spent looking without seeing, moving without arriving.
I push harder against the gradient, and somewhere in the cadence of breath and motion, the world begins to unveil itself and make more sense to me. The way diaphanous morning light catches the edge of a stone wall. The paricular verdancy of grass after rain. The cyclists on approach lifting two fingers from his handlebars. A small gesture that says I see you, fellow traveler.
This is what I remember: noticing isn’t about catching. It’s about allowing yourself to be caught.
The silent cartography of attention is something of interest to me as I get older. Since I was fourteen, the bike has been my santuary and my pedagogue. Not because cycling demands focus—though it does in London—but it creates the conditions where my attention can finally find repose. The mind, usually scattered across a thousand inchoate thoughts, finally finds something to anchor to: the immediate need of balance, the negotiation between effort and ease, the conversation between body and landscape.
Out on the road, I learned that noticing happens in strata. First, there’s the noticing of survival from the potholes, the obnoxious car door, the shift in weather and wind. Then comes the noticing of beauty—the way the shadows perambulate across the fields, the architecture of the clouds, the music of the wind when as it meets the various textures of earth.
But deepest is the noticing of yourself within all of this: how your breathing modulates on a climb, how your spirit lifts when you catch sight of the valley you’re about to explore below, how humanity returns when you respond to the wordless greeting of another cyclist.
The bicycle taught me that attention is like tuning a radio, adjusting the frequency until you’re suddenly receiving transmissions that were always there. But invisible. Waiting.
Now I sit in the floor of our flat. The afternoon light pooling around the room like something I might have imagined. The walls are still unfamiliar. The sounds from the street below still foreign. I walk back and fourth through the rooms and it still feels like the first time. This space we work so assiduously to earn.
For years, this moment existed only ever in the future tense. In a subjunctive mood. I would close my eyes and try to summon it. The feeling of being home, truly home, in a place that belonged to no one else. I practiced the gratitude I thought I would feel, I rehearsed the satisfaction of arrival. But sitting here now, I realised the moment is different to what I imagined.
It’s quieter. More quotidian. Like finally setting down a weight you didn’t realise you were carrying.
The light moves across the floor with the patience of centuries. I watch it the way I once watched the horizon from my bike; not waiting for it to reveal anything specific, just allowing it to be what it is. And in that, something shifts. The striving stops. The reaching ceases. There’s nowhere else to go because I’ve arrived at a way of being present with what is.
This is what I’ve learned about noticing: it’s like a resistence you release. Like learning to accept a gift without immediately thinking about what you owe in return, or how to improve it, or whether you deserve it.
On the bike, I notice the other way cyclists acknowledge each other—that brief lift of fingers, the subtle nod. It’s a recognition that passes between people who understand something together, that we’re all just trying to maintain the current inertia, and that there’s something beautiful about witnessing each other’s perseverence.
At home, I nice the way the light has its own prescience, finding the corners that need warming, retreating gracefully when its work is done. I notice how silence isn’t empty but full with possibility, with presence, with the slow setting of a life making room for itself in yours.
The art of noticing, I’m learning, isn’t more about becoming more perceptive. It’s about becoming more receptive. Less concerned with what you’re looking for, more available to what’s looking for you.
What cycling and that solitude have taught me most is that attention is a form of devotion. The kind that simply shows up, again and again, to whatever moment you’re actually in.
The quality of presence emerges when you stop trying to be somewhere else. When you allow your awareness to settle into the exact coordinates of now. Then you enjoy the particular slant of light through your window. The specific way your body meets the chair. The exact temperature of the air against your skin.
This is the art of noticing: learning to be native to your own experience, fluent in the language of the present moment, at home in the only place you can actually live.
The bicycle keeps teaching me this, hill after hill. The light keeps reminding me, afternoon after afternoon. And slowly, I’m learning to trust that the world has been waiting patiently for me to notice what was already there: the extraordinary disguised as the ordinary, and the sacred hidden in the simple act of paying attention.