I Wrote Another Book

I have been riding my motorcycle across over 100 countries for nearly twenty years, and I have spent a lot of time thinking about the moments that almost didn’t happen.

The stranger who waved me over for food, and I almost kept riding. The table that ran late in a way I almost escaped. The wrong road that turned out to be the right one — or was it the other way around. The people I almost missed.

I wrote about some of this in FORKS. But there was something underneath that story that I couldn’t get to in a book about food and roads and countries. It had to do with the invitations themselves. Not the journeys. The moments before the journeys. The ones that are easy to miss if you’re in a hurry, which most of us are.

The new book is called The Invitation: On the Moments We Almost Miss.

It’s short. 22,000 words. About a two-hour read. Not a travel book. Not a self-help book. Something in between that I have been trying to name for three years. The closest I can get is this: it’s a book about noticing. And about what happens after you notice.

I think of it sitting alongside books like Pico Iyer’s The Art of Stillness, Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks, and Mitch Albom’s Tuesdays with Morrie — books that use small moments to say something true about how we move through the world. Whether this book belongs in that company is genuinely not for me to decide.

Which is why I need you.

Before this manuscript goes to agents, I’m looking for two or three readers. Not editors. Not proofreaders. Readers. People who will read it the way you read any book — for the experience of it — and then tell me four things:

Where did you slow down?

Where did something not land?

What were you still thinking about the next day?

And in one or two sentences: what do you think this book is about?

That last question is the one that matters most. Don’t answer it until you finish.

If you’ve been along for any part of this ride — the WorldRider blog, FORKS, the keynotes, the three years of dust and border crossings and strangers who turned into something more — I’d be grateful for an hour or two of your honest attention.

Three weeks is the window. Email me at readers@worldrider.com or reply to this post. I’ll send a PDF.

And if you’ve read Pico Iyer or Burkeman or Albom and you’re the kind of person who underlines things and argues with the margins, even better.

— Allan