motorcyclemeditation.com

An incipient conversation about motorcycles, quickly terminated, the assumption being it’s about metal and revs and petrol and grunt, items of interest to those who’re interested in them, boring to all others. Such conversations best avoided, minds already made up, you just look like you’re protesting too much, better not to say anything, if it’s on your mind, write it.

Point about motorcycling, you’d say if you said anything, is sure, it has metal and the rest, such or suchlike being irreducibly requisite to physical existence. Boats have hulls and sails, aircraft have wings, motorcycles have engines, and a lot besides. So far so humdrum. It’s the world opened up that matters.

In the world opened up on a motorcycle, you’d say, things reduce to primal simplicity, a world dominated by velocity and wind, rain sometimes putting on a sideshow. The simplicity further simplified by being alone, mutely registering the passing of the world, responding to it, a mind engaging in wonder with the physical universe.

Such circumstances representing the opposite to the frazzle and fret of the world normally inhabited, not just opposite, also antidote, you’d tell your nonplussed audience. And from the resulting peace, a further discovery, a recognition of each passing moment and its uniqueness. Every situation, flowing past, having similarities with others previously encountered, yet also different, a point fundamental to survival on a motorcycle and capable of endless contemplation.

Knowledge of this point, each passing moment its sui generis self and no other, lying deeply at the core of motorcycling. Such being also an antidote, liberating the mind from Plato’s poisonous stamp, his forms being but a way of making lived life derivative and diluted, the here and now demoted. On a motorcycle, no such debilitating notions sustainable.

Your audience if such there still be, by now looking askance at each other, raising eyebrows, twirling fingers at temples. Yet these things my friends are true, and worth having.