The Bicycle

I had nowhere to go. That was the whole point. I was thirteen, maybe fourteen, and I’d get on my bicycle in Birbhum and just ride. No destination. No reason. No one waiting. Just the road and whatever was on either side of it and a Bengal afternoon with nothing to do.

I’d ride slowly. Sometimes for two hours. Sometimes longer. Past the same houses, the same fields, the same nothing in particular. Coming back home when it started getting dark, not because anything had happened but because the day was done.

I was thinking about this recently because I had a day with back to back calls, three things pending, a Shopify issue, messages I hadn’t replied to. Normal day. Busy in the way that feels like it means something while you’re in it.

And somewhere in the middle of it I thought about that bicycle.

The specific feeling of going nowhere slowly with nothing to figure out. No checklist. No outcome. Nowhere to arrive.

I haven’t had a day like that in years.

We’ve decided boredom is a problem.

Kids need activities, stimulation, structure. A free afternoon is a gap to be filled. We’ve built entire industries around filling it; classes, screens, programs, content designed specifically for the moment when nothing is happening.

But that bicycle ride was boring in a way that I now think was actually good for me. Nothing was happening. I wasn’t building anything or learning anything or going anywhere useful. I was just riding slowly through Birbhum because the afternoon was long and I had no reason to hurry.

That might have been the most free I’ve ever felt. I didn’t know it at the time.

I read something once about what the brain does during unstructured time. The finding was something like - the mind doesn’t go quiet when nothing is demanded of it. It actually gets busy in a different way. Processing things it didn’t have time to process, making connections it couldn’t make while focusing on something specific.

Basically daydreaming. Which we’ve decided is a waste of time.

Most things I’ve figured out didn’t come from sitting down to think about them. They came from a walk, a drive, a shower, a moment when I stopped trying and something arrived on its own.

The bicycle was full of that. Hours of it. Every afternoon.

You can’t really go back to it. That’s the honest part.

The bicycle worked because I had nothing else. No phone, no responsibilities that were actually mine yet. The freedom wasn’t a choice - it was just what thirteen in Birbhum looked like on a free afternoon.

As an adult you can take a walk without your phone and call it mindfulness but part of you is still somewhere else. Part of you is always somewhere else now. The pending list doesn’t disappear just because you’ve stepped away from it.

I think about Birbhum more than I expected to when I left.

Not the place exactly. Just the pace of it. The way an afternoon could be an afternoon without needing to become anything.

House of Kanzan is partly about that. A fragrance that doesn’t demand your attention. Something quiet in the background of a day that doesn’t stop. You put it on and somewhere between the morning and the evening something settles for a second.

That’s what those bicycle rides felt like.

I didn’t know then that I’d spend the next twelve years looking for that feeling again.