Shot on Fujifilm X-T3 with Fujinon XF 16-80mm f4
Breaking the Rhytm
When Maike approached me about this trip, it was more of a request to finally spent some quality time again. And, with that - the realization hit me. I had become one of those people. Silently. Subconsciously. Against everything I thought I would never be - caught up in life. By the time I found myself sitting in the car next to my friend heading out for this trip, I had already accepted the hard truth. I had ended up exactly what I had fiercely debated against at family gatherings I would never be: distanced from my own priorities, stretched by obligations. I could not even recall the last time we’d shared real, meaningful time together.
I always had a strong contempt for people who base their identity exclusively on the profession they hold, people who think job titles matter, who think their value rises or falls based on a performance review or their LinkedIn profile; hollowed out by the pursuit of a career. The kind of people who become strangers to themselves when stripped of their so-called “professional identity“; no longer able to imagine a life not governed by the restrictions of the nine to five. And, be honest, the only people caring about your job title are the ones barely knowing you or those - like parasites - looking to leech off of it.
Yet the reality, my reality was not about career ambition or some desperate climb up the professional ladder. It was simpler and, in some ways, more mundane and insidious: long office days, constant demands, fatigue of endless social interactions. The rhythms of it all drained me, left me too empty, too hollow to give much meaningful capacity to my people. I was not trying to build my identity around my job, but I was letting it consume my energy and attention all the same. That realization shook me—and it is part of the reason I was here, in this car, bikes in the back, and phone on flight mode to reclaim the balance I’d let slip.
Within the first ten kilometers of pedaling, I noticed the evidence of our sparsely spent time together. My memory of her—her habits, her preferences, the way she approached things—felt out of sync with the reality in front of me. Neither was there congruence with my assumption of her supermarket purchase nor with the gear she wore. That stark gap between familiarity and estrangement carried us through the next thirty kilometers, during which we began to fill in the blanks, catching up on life—not the life of schedules and obligations, but real life.
The following first long climb felt like a microcosm of everything we were rediscovering—a blend of familiarity and individuality that needed no explanation. After the rush of catching up, with its flood of new information and reminders of how much time had passed, the climb offered a natural rhythm for processing and reflecting. Each meter we ascended seemed to pull us further from the noise of life and deeper into the embrace of nature. The distractions of the world below faded into irrelevance.
When I stopped to take photos, Maike would catch up and continue ahead, each of us carving our own path in a shared journey. And at just the right moments, we would ride together, drawn side by side by the overwhelming beauty of the surroundings. It was only logical that when we reached the crowded mountain hut along the way, we didn’t stop. The noise, the people, the energy—intuitively it felt incongruous, a step backward into the clamor we’d come to escape. Instead, we pushed on to the top of the climb, where it was quieter, emptier.
The summit stood unmarked, free from the ubiquitous brown pass signs that often transform climbs into just another entry on an endless checklist and beckon status-hungry cyclists for a photo op. It felt like a quiet rejection of the same mindset that drives the climb up the career ladder or the pursuit of life’s traditional milestones—house, tree, family. These lists, often inherited rather than chosen, seem to strip away the essence of experience, reducing it to a metric of completion, as though life’s worth could be measured in checkmarks rather than intention or meaning.
That evening, the ancient Swiss Airbnb enveloped us in its timeless charm. The wooden bed with its cozy blanket lulled me into a long nap, its creaky wooden floors and thick walls seemed to hold the weight of countless quiet evenings past, inviting us to slow down. The act of cooking, deliberate and unhurried, provided its own space for reconnection. Between chopping vegetables and stirring pots, the best of conversations happen - I hope we can all agree on that.
The second day played out like a lesson in the Pareto Principle, where effort and outcome skewed ever more unevenly. The first climb, long but steady, consumed most of our time yet felt manageable. The second, steeper and shorter, with a comically steep descent. By the final ascent, its gradient forced us off the bikes most of the time, effort and progress no longer in balance. The descents followed a similar curve: the first tested our technical skills, requiring precision; the second was in parts steep to the point of comedy, a trial in laughter and resignation; and the third, rough and relentless, stripped gravel bikes of its grace altogether. And yet, the day culminated in the stillness of Lago di Cancano, where the waters seemed indifferent to the imbalance, as if to suggest that meaning is not in how the equation tallies but in making a deliberate effort in moving on a bicycle as well as in making time for your friends.
The third and final day began before dawn, both of us aware of the challenges ahead. The breakfast the Refugio had provided me with felt like I was rolling already, without my bicycle. Wrapped in every layer we had brought, we stepped out into the cold morning air at nearly 2,000 meters above sea level. The lake shore faded behind us as we approached a narrowing valley, steep walls closing in. Soon enough we were literally in on of those steep walls on an old military track. With every turn, I could feel tension build up in Maike until she had to stop. Her frustration struck a chord, echoing the realizations that had brought me on this trip. It was not due to the gradient but the switchbacks that had quietly built up a non-visible weight of expectations of herself by herself. Watching her, I couldn’t help but see a reflection of my own struggles, of how easily we become ensnared by the pressures we impose on ourselves, too often without even realizing it. Most of the time for her as well as for me, the only way is through. So, after regaining breath, we continued to climb. Once the first sun rays touched our skin and called for an end of this part of the climb, tension slowly dissolved. With the opening horizon at the plateau came relief, perspective, and the quiet satisfaction of perseverance and progress. With all that strength, there was still no shame in walking, never a need to prove anything between the two of us.
I once wrote about a distinctive trip in the Alps that the connections formed in the mountains are deeper, the memories made longer lasting, that trust grows with every step or it vanishes completely, that life in the mountains is more direct and that this is how I prefer it. Maike and I predominantly built our friendship in the mountains. So we continued to deepen it there.