Autumn has arrived. The light is changing. Not dramatically – it’s more like the world has shifted slightly on its axis while you were sleeping. The coffee tastes different, as if infused with the crispness of autumn. The morning air carries a hint of change.

You wake before the alarm.

There’s a morning when you catch yourself standing at the window, looking at nothing in particular. The commute that seemed perfectly reasonable in July now feels out of sync with the autumnal shift. The meetings, the emails, the Friday drinks – they continue. You continue. Everything continues.

But there’s this space that’s opened up. Between who you were at breakfast and who you are by lunch. A gap you can’t name.

Someone asks how you are, and you say, “Fine,” because what else is there to say? That you dreamed about mountains you’ve never seen? That you found yourself looking at flight prices to places you can’t pronounce? That sometimes, in the middle of a perfectly ordinary Tuesday, you feel like you’re watching your life from a great distance?

Your body seems to sense the change before your mind fully comprehends it. Your shoulders carry tensions from battles you didn’t think you were fighting. Your lungs have been taking these careful, measured breaths for so long that you’ve forgotten what it feels like to properly fill them.

The Ones Who Leave and Return

There are people who leave. Not permanently – that would be too simple. They leave and they come back, and when they come back, something behind their eyes has shifted. Like they’ve been let in on something.

They don’t try to explain it. How could they?

Instead, they’ll mention something small – the way dust tastes in Ethiopia, how your body learns a different rhythm when walking becomes the only thing required of you, the specific weight of exhaustion that comes after you’ve given everything and found there was more.

The meditation of pedalling through Vietnamese dawn, when cycling becomes breathing, becomes thinking, becomes not thinking at all.

These aren’t tales of adventure and conquest; they are stories of personal journeys and introspection.

It’s the morning you realise you haven’t thought about your phone for three days. The moment a stranger becomes essential simply because they’re riding the same route, walking the same path. The evening when you’re so tired you could weep, and somehow that’s exactly where you need to be.

What the Body Remembers

Salt air fills lungs differently – this isn’t metaphor, but the chemistry and physics of a body remembering its oceanic origins. Each sensation here speaks its own truth: volcanic rock crackling under boots, coffee smoke weaving through red dust. These elements combine into a ritual that needs no explanation.

The rhythm of wheels on tarmac teaches patience. Hour after hour, the landscape changes so slowly that you don’t notice until suddenly you’re somewhere else entirely. Cambodia unfolds this way. Laos reveals itself in increments. Your legs learn what your mind resists: that some distances can only be covered one rotation at a time.

The people who return – and they do return, again and again – aren’t chasing achievement. Kilimanjaro doesn’t care if you summit. The Mara doesn’t notice you’ve arrived. The road from Vietnam to Cambodia isn’t impressed by your cycling.

Something happens between Day Three and Day Four. Or between the fifth mile and the sixth. Between the fortieth kilometre and the fiftieth. The moment varies, but the recognition doesn’t: you are not who you were when you started. Not transformed – that’s too grand a word. Just… accurate. Finally accurate.

The Space Between

There’s a woman who’s done this eleven times. Different challenges – trekking in Ethiopia, cycling through Asia, walking with gorillas in Uganda. When asked why, she doesn’t talk about the places. She talks about the space between them. The person she is at altitude. The clarity that comes after eight hours in the saddle. The way her children look at her when she comes home – like they’re seeing her properly for the first time.

“It’s not about being brave,” she says. “It’s about being present. When you’re cycling up a mountain pass in Laos, you can’t be anywhere else. Your legs are screaming, your lungs are working, and somehow that’s exactly what freedom feels like.”

Autumn knows things. It knows that comfort tells only half the story. It knows that some hungers can’t be fed by consuming. It knows that the life you’ve built might be perfectly good and still be too small.

The Thread That Pulls

The thread that pulls people back isn’t visible until you’re holding it – like the way your hands remember the grip of bicycle handlebars months later, or how your ears still ring with the call to prayer. You can’t see it in the photographs, can’t hear it in the stories. It lives in the place between breathing out and breathing in. In the moment when you stop trying to be anything other than what you are: tired, present, alive.

Some threads, once felt, can’t be unfelt.

The return is the hardest part, as it involves reconciling the person you’ve become with the life you left behind. But the return to the carefully scheduled life, to the person everyone expects you to be. You sit at your desk, and something in you is still walking. You lie in your comfortable bed and feel the ground beneath you. You drive your car and remember the simple honesty of pedalling, of earning every mile with your own power.

This is why they go again. Not to escape but to return to something true. To strip away the unnecessary until only the essential remains. To find, in the words of someone who’s been there, “the person I recognise but have never been before.”

What Autumn Asks

Autumn doesn’t push. It creates conditions. Some mornings, you wake and know exactly what you’re hungry for. Other mornings, you wake and realise you’ve been starving for years.

The people who go – they’re not special. They’re not braver or stronger or more adventurous. They just reached a morning when the gap between who they were and who they could be became unbearable. When continuing became harder than beginning.

There’s no promise in any of this. No guarantee of transformation. Just the simple fact that somewhere, people are walking. Cycling. Their lungs are working harder than they have in years. They’re discovering what their bodies can do when asked. They’re learning the names of strangers who will matter forever.

Whether it’s wheels on ancient roads or boots on volcanic soil, the mechanism is the same: movement becomes meditation, strangers become family, and somewhere between the suffering and the sunrise, you meet your true self – the one who’s been waiting all along.

Like these journeys of discovery, autumn makes space for questions.

What you do with that space – well, that’s between you and whatever wakes you before the alarm.

Some October, you might find yourself in a place where the only thing required is to keep moving forward. Where email doesn’t exist. Where your worth isn’t measured in productivity but in presence. Where you remember what your body is for.

The invitation is always there. In the quality of autumn light. In the restlessness that comes with shorter days. In the stories of people who left and came back different.

Not everyone needs this. But you already know if you do.

What calls you back to yourself?
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