One Gear, Infinite Roads
I ride with one gear.
Not because I can’t afford many. Not because I don’t know the ease of shifting, the way derailleurs hum when the chain glides across cogs. No, I ride with one gear because one gear is enough.
A fixed gear or a single speed—it doesn’t matter. What matters is the philosophy of constraint. The simplicity that forces you into rhythm. The surrender to terrain, to gradient, to wind. With one gear, you don’t conquer the road. You make peace with it.
In a world of endless choices, one gear is my anchor. One tooth less or more can mean the difference between spinning freely or grinding painfully uphill. I know the numbers well: 48×17 (76.2 gear inches) for speed, momentum, and the thrill of chasing horizons. 48×18 (72 gear inches) when the city asks me to dance with stoplights, corners, and fatigue.
Switching between them is switching between moods. One whispers urgency, the other offers patience. Both remind me: life doesn’t need twenty-one speeds to move forward. Sometimes, one is enough.
Pedal Strikes & Lessons in Flesh
It always happens in silence. The sudden grind of pedal against asphalt mid-turn. The jolt through the frame. The heart that skips, legs that tighten, and in one breathless instant—the possibility of going down.
I’ve had my share of crashes. Scraped palms, bleeding knees, chain tattoos etched in grease and pain. I’ve limped home with bent wheels, cracked rims, handlebars turned crooked. Each scar is a punctuation mark in my story.
But pedal strikes teach humility. They remind me that arrogance on a fixie is punished quickly. You cannot lean like a geared racer in corners; your pedals keep spinning whether you’re ready or not. Life is the same—momentum never stops. The trick is learning when to hold back, when to lean softer, when to trust balance over bravado.
I remember one night—rain-slicked streets, delivery bag heavy with orders. I cut a corner too sharp near Muradpur. The left pedal caught the road. My body launched sideways. I landed in a pool of water, the order still strapped to my back, steaming against my spine. The customer never knew the drama of their food arriving. But I knew. I limped away soaked, sore, wiser.
Pain writes its lessons deep into the flesh. And each time I pedal again, I whisper: Don’t fight the spin. Flow with it.
Cadence & Meditation
There is a silence only a cyclist knows. It isn’t the silence of an empty room or the stillness of night. It’s the silence inside the motion.
Spin after spin, cadence becomes breath. Breath becomes rhythm. Rhythm becomes prayer.
On long stretches—the Bayezid Link Road, the curve toward Bhatiari, the endless run toward Kumira—I lose myself in repetition. 90 RPM, heart steady, eyes fixed on the horizon. It is meditation without incense. Prayer without words.
The city may roar around me—buses honking, rickshaws clattering, vendors shouting—but inside the circle of my wheels, I am calm. Each revolution says the same thing: keep going. Keep going. Keep going.
And in that endless mantra, worries dissolve. Deadlines, arguments, hunger, exhaustion—they blur into the hum of the chain. What remains is pure being.
Cadence has taught me that peace is not found in stillness. Peace is found in motion without resistance.
One Gear, Many Roads
There are days I ride my 48×17 fixie—the gear inches heavy, the ride demanding. It is the road of ambition. Each push is a declaration: I will not slow down. It feels like chasing dreams with urgency, daring gravity to break me.
Other days, I swap to 48×18 single speed—softer, slower, kinder. This gear forgives fatigue. It lets me coast on descents, catch my breath after long shifts, turn corners without fear of strikes. It feels like living gently, without forcing the world to bend.
And the truth is: both gears live inside me.
Ambition and patience. Urgency and surrender. The hunger for speed and the wisdom of slowing down.
One gear teaches me to adapt not by changing the machine, but by changing the mind. When the road rises, I rise with it. When the road eases, I breathe deeper. Life is the same.
Coffee Break Diaries
The delivery rider’s life is measured in kilometers and orders. But between the pick-ups and drop-offs lies another world: the coffee break.
In GEC Circle, a small café knows me by my helmet and sweat. I order a cup—sometimes black, sometimes sweet, always steaming. I sit by the window, my bag resting like a tired animal beside me.
In those minutes, I write. Poems scratched into notebooks, reflections typed into my phone. The city rushes outside—horns, dust, chaos—but inside, words flow like the steam rising from my cup.
One time, after a brutal 60 km shift, I wrote a verse on a napkin:
“Wheels spin,
but words hold still.
The road rushes by,
yet coffee teaches pause.”
Those moments of stillness are survival. They remind me that even machines need rest, and even riders need reflection. Coffee breaks are not wasted time—they are the breath between stanzas in the poem of the day.
Pedals & Poetry in the City
Some people write in quiet rooms. I write in motion.
Every street corner has a line of verse. Every delivery route is a stanza. The city itself is my notebook.
When I ride through Chawkbazar, I see metaphors in markets overflowing. When I climb the slope toward Bayezid, I taste the rhythm of resilience. When rain soaks me in Bhatiari, I feel poems dripping from my skin.
I have delivered food with one hand and written phrases in my head with the other. I have composed entire verses on a 20 km stretch, repeating them until I could scribble them down. My poems are sweat-stained, grease-marked, born from cadence as much as thought.
To me, cycling is not separate from writing. They are the same act: turning chaos into rhythm, motion into meaning.
And when I finally sit at night, tired legs stretched, I pour those poems onto paper. Wheels whisper wisdom louder than books. The city becomes literature. And I, its courier, deliver both food and words.
The One Gear Philosophy
In the end, the one gear is more than a choice of bike. It is a way of living.
It says: simplify. Strip away excess. Find discipline in limitation. Accept the road as it is.
It says: keep spinning. Through crashes, through fatigue, through deadlines and hunger. The wheels do not stop. Neither should you.
It says: write your story in revolutions. In coffee stains, in pedal strikes, in scars, in poems.
And above all, it says: one is enough. One gear, one life, one rider, one road.
Because the truth is simple: you don’t need more to move forward. You just need to keep pedalling.
ENG
