motorcyclemeditation.com

Eight thirty on a clear summer Saturday morning, the day no longer young but London still not yet awake. Breakfasted on homemade wholewheat bread, two slices, toasted, no butter, marmalade, fresh black coffee, two mugs. The motorcycle zipping along, uncontested master of the world surveyed. Hyde Park the destination, two hours of skating in store before the crowds start thronging.

This perfect cameo encapsulating the sweet joys of being alive together with the reasons for the sweetness. Doing exactly the things desired, and having no desire for any other, nor for slightest variation. Being in London. Being on the motorcycle. After a breakfast by the side of which no other looks tempting. The prospect of a sport whose spells make you forget its physical grind.

The key being the life goal, finding the things which matter to you. Conversely, picking off the long long list of things which don’t. An enterprise surprisingly unstraightforward. Years or decades involved in burning off false candidates, locating new potentialities, nurturing the ones with value. Vastly different for each individual, you have to excavate your own landscape, this being integral to the adventure.

A particular trap, assuming you want something when actually you don’t. In my case, cars. Together with schoolfriends, salivating over glossy magazine photographs, obsessing over acceleration times, drooling at any sightings on the road. Only later realizing, those are the best things about cars, actually own one and you need a king’s ransom to run it, all for the sake of mostly sitting immobile in traffic. So, an adolescent dream grown out of. Not something that everybody can say.

Strange how motorcycling, also a traditional adolescent dream, emerges as something so utterly different. The day to day experience hugely exceeding the static pristine glamour of glossy photographs, where with cars it falls so short.

Well, here we are, arrived at Hyde Park. Feels good to know these major things about yourself. How to locomote, where to live, what sport to do. And dammit, put them all together like today, it’s just so good to be alive.