As a historian I have always known how valuable travellers' journals can be in providing a more complete record of places in the past. It just makes sense that people who live in a place are not necessarily sensitive to what surrounds them, to the things large and small that stand between them and what they're doing, whereas a visitor will see things with fresh eyes, will pause and pay attention.

I was cycling along my routine route, the one I followed a couple times a week for exercise. Cycling is good for someone like me who spends so much time reading and writing. The driver who hit me did not know I was a historian and I had no idea that, once I was able to walk again, I would enter a different city. A city within a city: slow motion Sydney.

The doctors speculated that the car first hit me in the ribs, breaking several front and back, driving me down onto the cycle seat, which rose up and broke my pelvis from underneath. I was already unconscious when I fell over and snapped my collarbone clean. I awoke at the scene screaming in pain thinking I had broken my back but, luckily, it was just part of a rib digging toward my spine. I went in and out of consciousness for another hour or so, both from the shock and generous doses of painkillers.

They kept me in intensive care for two days. Entertainment on the second night was provided by full-scale morphine delusions worthy of Guy Pearce in Memento. I was not only wise to how hospital staff manipulated the passage of time to lure me into walking again but, as a historian, I was able to locate the origin of this technique in the use of biomechanics in Russian theatre in the 1920s, I let a very puzzled night nurse know.

Three weeks in hospital and a couple weeks at home passed before I ventured outside alone, armed with my crutch. From nonchalantly cycling 20k with barely a puff, 20m exhausted me for the rest of the day. Over the next few weeks, I hobbled my way bit by bit down to the grocery store, a distance that used to take five minutes now took twenty, not counting rests along the way.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest 'Many months later, I still am not back on the bike'. Photograph: flickr

Without my normal strength or reflexes, and with pains laminating each step, the path became fraught with loose rocks, slippery patches of grass, uneven sidewalks, and curbs that felt like cliffs. My 100-meter dash had turned into a slow-motion steeplechase. And there was a balancing act no one else could see, between the painkillers and trying to get off the painkillers. There is a myth about the euphoria they bring, when in fact they dull the brightness of life; like other toxins, they kill more than their target.

Grocery store aisles were good training for the dangers that lay ahead at train stations. People making important decisions about breakfast cereal do not pay attention to those around them, but at least they move slowly. There is time to avoid the little nudges that broken ribs will amplify into wincing sheets of pain.

People running to catch a train during rush hour are a multiple threat. I don't share their confidence in acceleration and maneuverability among crowds; it reminds me of cars. I understand the pain they must suffer missing 15 minutes from their lives waiting for the next train, but their mad dash calls upon reflexes that I left on the road months ago. After hobbling that gauntlet, the young people too lost on their phones to give me a seat almost look cute.

Crossing the road at rush hour was the biggest hell. Drivers complain about rush hour pent up among other cars, but once released onto side streets they feverishly make up lost time, only to meet slow-citizens like me crossing at uncontrolled street corners. A few stripes painted on the road would stop them dead in their tracks; without the stripes new negotiations must happen on the fly where steel has an unfair advantage. Crossing in slow motion in such a situation increases the speed of cars correspondingly and the depth of fear exponentially. A wildly waving crutch could not snap certain drivers out their rush hour daze.

Being hit by a car rides roughshod over whatever faith one may have once had in the goodwill of drivers. This was perhaps the biggest surprise: there are unspoken codes, a trust operating in whatever mode of transport we take—walking, biking, driving—and the way each interacts with the other. Some interactions are fraught, to be sure, but we still trust we know where "being careful" will work. When that trust is gone, all trust is gone. Many months later I still am not back on the bike, but for several months after being hit, I had trouble being in the passenger's seat of a car.

Taxis are the odd exception. The obvious explanation is that they are devils familiar with all the evils the road will give them, but my theory is that taxi drivers are a type of short-order priest. Men have such priests in barbers and bartenders. They have the conversational skills to counsel one through difficult periods in life, to heal the sick and wounded, in body and mind. When the pain is pushing in, verily, taxi drivers appear as angels.

You are aware of the clichéd cinematic image of a sole individual standing still or moving slowly as everything else in their world speeds past in a blur. Put yourself in that position. There are cities within the city with rhythms within rhythms that overlap and, at times, collide. What the image does not show is that there are other people there with you. The city blurs around many people. They occupy the same space but live in a different passage of time than the Sydney most people know.

Slow people often acknowledge one another, little nods and commiserations that cement the demographic. I struck up a nice conversation while passing a fellow slow citizen at about 1 kph. I carefully studied my colleagues and eventually acquired their talent for sitting on a park bench. Just sitting. A whole new social and natural environment unfolds once you slow down. It is really quite wonderful. It is like the slow food movement, but for living. It is not a place you can easily visit by car, and there must be a better way to visit slow motion Sydney than being hit by a car.