There’s something almost monastic about this mechanic’s workshop. The tools arranged like sacred relics, the quiet rituals of tuning an engine, the slow work of bringing something worn and rusted back to life. To an outsider, it might look like simple labour—just a man fixing bikes. But to those who understand, it’s something deeper. A kind of worship. A way of being in the world. It’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance made flesh, a meditation on craft, devotion, and the sacred nature of working with one’s hands. The shop is not just a place of repair; it is a sanctuary. The work is not just about fixing machines; it’s about giving them new life.
“Replacing brakes, changing oil, tuning engines—doing these things give them an extra lease on life.”
Robert Pirsig would have recognised this philosophy immediately. In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, he argued that quality isn’t just something in the object; it’s in the relationship between the person and the work they do. It’s in the attention, the patience, and the care. The video echoes that sentiment beautifully—restoration is not just about mechanics; it’s about meaning.
There’s an old-school defiance to this, too. A resistance against the disposable culture that treats old things as junk.
“Time is both awareness and enemy.”
Everything decays, but not everything has to be discarded. Paschoal Revitte, the mechanic in the short film, doesn’t just fix bikes—he saves them. He honours their stories and sees their worth even when others would write them off as rusted-out relics. And in doing so, he reminds us that restoration is an act of defiance. A belief that things can be made whole again.
That same ethos applies far beyond the workshop. Think about writing. Art. Music. Even digital spaces. There’s an obsession with the new—the next big thing, the next viral post, the next trend. But there’s something deeply radical about choosing to restore rather than replace. About tending to old ideas, old crafts, old ways of being.
This video leaves me with a question: What in my life is worth restoring? What practices, what knowledge, what forgotten things deserve another lease on life?
And maybe, in the act of restoration, I can find wholeness again.
Shouout to Dave who sent me the link to the video.
What I saw was a beautifully crafted film and while Paschoal is incredible at resurrecting forgotten motorcycles, he is human. The side that we see of a man and machine might not mirror the same in other aspects of his life (I big assumption and I not intending in doing him a disservice). The whole may not be perfect, but the sum of the whole is good enough. Are there specific aspects of wholeness you seek to restore?
There’s plenty of parts I’ve left undone or underdeveloped that have potential for wholesness.