motorcyclemeditation.com

Alone at last on the motorcycle, free of festive excess. A burden lifted and the motorcycle surging forward to accentuate the liberty. Cleansed by the freezing air. The layers of thermal gear working silently, good to keep you warm for about an hour, maybe ninety minutes. After that, hypothermia, the first sign of which, sleepiness, the next sign, unbeknown to you, flashing lights, stretchers, a body bag, yours.

The hard clean road whisking past beneath, thoughts turning back through the week’s conversations, different entire from the previous year’s, less incessant rattling about rising house prices and new cars, less chitchat about bonuses and share prices. If anything, wondrous talk about precipitous decline, beneath it, the awakening, everything that was self-evidently true, wasn’t, those who were supposed to know, didn’t.

Alone on the motorcycle, ninety miles an hour, the blue sky clean and clear. A cluster of traffic ahead, the motorcycle howling past. The cars hobbled in their orderly lines, each one betokening the cloying nonsense of prevailing wisdoms of the day. Unshackled on the motorcycle, relishing the joys of the outrider.

Outriding carrying advantages, yet also disadvantages. For a decade, watching asset prices rise, thinking, this can’t last, it’s a bubble, where’s the worth. Analysis right, timing, wrong. Timing being the more important. As in music, play the right note at the wrong time, it’s the wrong note. Or on a motorcycle, you can get everything right but if the timing’s wrong, goodnight.

So, the people who're wrong, getting richer. The people who're right, falling behind. The wrong people requiring only somebody more wrong to sell to, a greater fool. The mindset mushrooming like a virus, the supply of greater fools never ending. Mostly unthinking. Where thinking, planning to get out at the last moment, a stratagem only possible in hindsight or with outrageous luck.

Better plan, forget about all that, think instead on true worth, how you spend the passing moment along the way. A lesson in which, riding a motorcycle on a fabulous cold clear winter day.