motorcyclemeditation.com

A fifty mile motorcycle ride, dull rainy weather, the world in varying shrunken shades of grey. Water thick on the surfaces, sprayed high by speeding trucks. All handled nonchalantly by the motorcycle.

Leaving only visibility as the menace. Amorphous pale shapes looming on the paler road. Some cars with their lights on, faint red glows imparting crucial information on line and distance. Occasionally, finding a car going a similar speed, that warming glow, planting yourself behind, following it faithfully. The respite welcome, you can’t keep your concentration so high for so long, you need the break. The car becoming your friend, guiding you through.

But the friend then getting stuck behind slower traffic, the danger lying more in slowing down amidst the spray than accelerating past. Leaving you alone and friendless on the motorcycle. Peering through the dripping visor, finding the next looming grey shape. Someone driving slowly in the outside lane, lights off. Fingers on the brake lever. Constant calculation of the safest line.

Don’t these cars without lights themselves register how much easier it is to see other cars with lights switched on. Presumably not. Or maybe they simply forget that they haven’t turned their own on, done that myself often enough. Whatever. You can’t get angry, you need to ride your motorcycle in the world that actually exists, not worry how things should be. Or work yourself up into a cantankerous miff about the putative number of downright idiots on the road.

Then suddenly the rain passed. The looming shapes taking on outlines and definition. A pleasure of motorcycling, when you’re stuck indoors rain feels like a steady state, with the speed of the motorcycle, it’s more a local variation that you pass through. And having passed through a big one, wow, how easy everything suddenly is. Clenched muscles relaxing and a smile easing on to the face.