motorcyclemeditation.com

Zipping along the North Circular, motorcycle engine burbling sweetly. The essence of being alive, or one of them anyway. The pleasure sharpened after a radio program this morning, an angler talking about fishing. No interest in competition, just the joy of being beside water, this simple state alone healing the wounds and bruises of the mind as if by magic.

The solitary closeness to things basic and eternal, its counterpart on a motorcycle being the sense of motion, also an absolute. Motion and its demonic cousin, acceleration, never more completely enabled than on a motorcycle, nor more capable of being part of everyday life. Like today, a steady fifty, irritations left far behind, mind at peace.

The angler’s remarks on the radio further endearing themselves by referring to such considerations only in passing, not preaching. The abstractions given ballast by his steady emphasis on the practical, things like watching water patterns and vegetation and insects. Merely hearing him speak, the river and the fish, not him, being the focus, leaving a soft calmness still present hours later here on the motorcycle.

One remark particularly standing out, when he fishes he takes naught but his rod plus what he can fit in his pockets. A considerable restriction since although the pockets are capacious, so are his sandwiches which have to be fit in as well. As he becomes tempted to take more stuff, he recognizes this as being sucked back into the exact consumerist world that the point is to escape. To achieve the simplicity requisite for the clean uncluttered experience, strip out everything but the indispensable.

A pragmatic discipline with profound consequences, elegantly depicted. Must work hard to do the same on the motorcycle, actually, come to think of it, there’s not much to do, the motorcycle does it for you. There’s the motorcycle, your gear, and you. Finito. No point in any more, nor can there be.