Not working, and the brain catching up.

Day four out of Sydney. Two meanings. I’m not working — away from the day job. And the brain isn’t working the corporate way — it keeps trying to.

There are two ways the phrase lands. The first is the easy one: I am not working, in the way most people mean it — there is no laptop, no calendar, no Salesforce org open in a tab, no client expecting an answer by Thursday. The second one is the harder one, and the one I am still figuring out. The brain isn’t working the corporate way. It keeps trying to. It is day four out of Sydney, on a ride that will take the rest of the year, and the part of me that thinks in fortnights does not yet understand that fortnights are over.

The day in the order it happened. Out of camp at Log Bridge Creek a little after eight. Tumut. Talbingo. The thermal pools at Yarrangobilly from the lookout above. Up over the Kiandra plains in a sideways wind. Across the Murray into Victoria. Down through Colac Colac into the Nariel Valley. Two hundred and thirty kilometres, mostly sealed. None of it physically difficult. All of it quietly internal in a way that surprises me a little.

I rode the first three days the way I always ride the first three days of a long trip — like a project. Bike fuelled. Distance logged. Tank bag adjusted (badly). Camp at the spot the satellite said would be flat. The mental model is the same one I use at work: identify the deliverable, identify the dependencies, execute. It is, I suspect, what most of us were taught is what it means to be functional. It is not actually what works on a bike. It is just what works in an office.

Fortnights are over. The body knows it. The brain is the slowest of the three.

The shift, when it comes, comes somewhere on the descent off the Kiandra plains. The wind is hard enough that the bike is moving sideways in the gusts, the road is empty in both directions, and there is no version of me that is going to be in an office today, this week, this month, or — if I do this right — any time soon. Some kilometres are quieter than others. This one is quiet enough that the inside of my head finally gets noticed.

The thought is not the obvious one. The obvious one is I am free now. That one I had on day one, riding out of the apartment with the bike loaded for the first time. Day four’s thought is more practical and slightly more uncomfortable: the version of me that runs in fortnights cannot also run this trip. The pace is wrong. The unit of measurement is wrong. The kind of attention is wrong. I have to put down a way of being that I have been paid well to embody for fifteen years, and I have to put it down on a public road, in a cold wind, by myself.

I make camp at Stacey’s Bridge a little before five. River. Picnic table. Toilet. A bull-ant bite I don’t notice for ten minutes. A failed attempt at panning for gold in a creek that gave a hundred and seventy years of diggers everything it had. The fire goes on the second strike. Hunter ticks and clacks his heat into the dusk. The phone, mercifully, has no signal.

Sitting at the picnic table with a cup of hot water — that is still the only thing going in or out of me on day twelve of the fast I started in March — I notice the silence is no longer something I am pushing back against. Three days ago it would have been. The brain would have filled it with calendar items, tomorrow’s route, the things I am not currently solving for someone. Today the silence is just the sound of Wheeler Creek doing its work in the dark.

The trick of long-distance riding — the part nobody explains because nobody can — is that the body adapts faster than the brain. By the end of day one, the legs know the standing position. By the end of day two, the shoulders have remembered what a real load feels like. By the end of day three the back has stopped complaining about the seat. The brain is the slowest. The brain wants to keep running the office routine in the absence of an office, because that is what it knows how to do, and putting that down takes longer than putting down a tank bag. Four days, in my case. About 800 kilometres. Most of a thermos of coffee at Yarrangobilly. A failed gold pan. A bull ant. The descent off Kiandra.

Quiet, even.

Tomorrow it’s up to Mt Hotham, then out through Dargo and down out of the mountains. About forty per cent of the way to Geelong, where the ferry waits. The tank bag will be moved. There are a few more adjustments to come. But the important adjustment, the internal one, has already happened. Confident, even. Quiet, even.

The brain isn’t working. That’s the whole idea.

A written companion to Tumut to Stacey’s Bridge — Episode 8 on the Motorcycle Seat Wisdom YouTube channel. The full long-form trip report is at Journey 08.