motorcyclemeditation.com

Summertime, fish a-jumpin, cotton high, and heaven to be on a motorcycle. For ten mile trips in town, shorts, polo shirt, trainers, helmet, visibility vest. The risk of traveling without protective gear counterbalanced by the freedom and all the advantages to health flowing therefrom. Longer trips, more gear, mostly because anything above forty, the wind gets heavy.

A familiar conundrum to mull over. The opportunity in a few weeks to take some time off, maybe go away. Trouble is, it’s so damn pleasant here. Each new day a new thing to notice, a new part of London to discover, created anew in that day’s light. To sacrifice for what? Getting annoyed in airports, getting overcharged for tasteless meals, following tedious tourist trails.

The heart of the issue, place. To be here, or to go there. More and more, place becoming important, a fundamental of personal welfare. Made more intense on a motorcycle, and in a strange way. Anyone would think, you have a motorcycle, you have the means of escaping place, moving on. Actually, you have the means not really to go there faster, rather to be here better, to understand the place, peel aside its surface, see the interrelations.

The motorcycle sweeping aside petty considerations of distance and obstruction, the place itself becoming accessible. But taking time and effort and repetition, like a discipline. Unquestionably beyond the reach of casual titillation on holiday.

Today, London, the place you thought you knew, that was last year, this summer it’s different. New people, new buildings, new everything. The things you didn’t see, the parts you’ve never been.

On the motorcycle today, a new route, coming up to the West End from a different angle, new excitements discovered. The Thames at high tide, the trees at the roadside full of leaf, light sparkling off windscreens. Think I’ll see if I can avoid going any place else.