Finding Meaning on Two Wheels: a philosophy of motorcycling

My professional life is kicking the shit out of me this year, so when the never ending winter of COVID finally ended and the roads cleared so that I could ride again it felt like coming up for air after a winter underwater.  It isn't too far a reach to say that riding feels like breathing to me.

I'm in the process of buying another bike, one big enough for my son and I to go on rides again with, and the current owner said he'd never ride again.  I can't imagine a situation where I'd ever say that.  You sometimes hear stories of elderly senior citizens who still ride.  That'll be me, or I won't be a senior citizen.

In the professional reflections blog I've been thinking about full commitment and how a job that encourages it can make you your best self.  It's a lasting sadness that so many people see work as purgatory rather than an opportunity to find their better selves.

The Japanese are much better at this than westerners are.  They don't wish each other good luck when doing something difficult, they simply say, "gambate!" or 'do your best!'  And that effort is what is respected regardless of outcome.  They make effort a socially appreciated thing where western cultures tend to fixate on winning.  There is a great scene in the Tokyo Ghoul anime where the bad guy is dying after a vicious fight.  He's an evil, cannibal ghoul so there aren't many redeeming features there, but everyone stops to listen respectfully to his last words because he put up such an epic fight.  We're all too busy trying to win to care about anything like that.  We'd vilify and belittle him rather than respect the effort.  This makes us remarkably unhappy because the problem with competition is that there is always a loser.

When you're approaching an activity that makes full use of your facilities you get lost in it.  It doesn't limit you, it expands you, makes you better.  Motorcycling is a technically complex, physically and mentally demanding activity that asks a lot of you, but the rewards are worth the risks.

If you're Simon Pavey or Guy Martin or Valentino Rossi, you race because that's where you have to get to in order to find the edge of your skills and give you that sense of complete immersion.  The leading edge of my own motorcycling has also moved on.  Where I'd once be happy with commuting on a small bike, I'm now working my way through ownership of different kinds of bikes and wish to expand further.  The limits I'm seeking in motorcycling aren't just in riding, but also in mechanics.  It's for that reason that I find events like the Dakar, especially when someone like Lyndon Poskitt does it in the malle moto class, so fascinating.  They're combining that technical skill with riding ability in a way that most racers can't or won't.

My work is usually able to give me enough latitude to fully immerse myself, but this year COVID has made it a broken thing unable to do anything well.  It has changed from an opportunity to seek excellence to never ending triage in mediocrity.  This has me asking hard questions about what I'd do if I didn't need the money it provides.  These are questions you should ask yourself before retirement, but they're also questions you should ask yourself when you're in danger of getting mired in work that doesn't let you find your best self.

Watching Ride With Norman Reedus last week, he was on the South Island of New Zealand where he had a chat with a young man from Canada who had opened up a business there.  One of his reasons for living where he does was that there had to be good riding roads easily accessible nearby.  This means he can explore riding in challenging circumstances, which seems like enlightenment to me.

In my final years of teaching I hope I can rediscover that sense of energizing peak performance that improves rather than limits me, and if not there then in another job that gives me the latitude I need to chase excellence while supporting my family.  Should I ever get to the point where I don't need to spend my days working for someone else, then it'll be time to move to a place where I can explore riding more fully.

That somewhere would have easy to access track days that let me explore riding dynamics at the edge of road riding, complex local roads that make me a better rider and off road opportunities that let me explore riding in a variety of unpaved situations.  Where I am now offers none of these things.  I'd also have the means to develop my mechanical skills to the limit.  I'm fortunate in that I have such a rich hobby and sport to explore.  I feel sorry for those that don't.

The Ruminating Rider: Entropy

en·tro·py

ˈentrəpē/
1. lack of order or predictability; gradual decline into disorder.
"the old bike finally succumbed to entropy amidst the weeds."
synonyms:
deterioration, degeneration, crumbling, decline, degradation, decomposition, breaking down, collapse;


Out of high school it looked like my life's work was going to be mechanics.  I apprenticed as a millwright and quickly found a comfortable living doing work that I found satisfying.  When I put down the tools and went to university I spent a lot of time chasing down philosophy and literature that was looking at a perfected idea of the world.  The thought of spending my time thinking about machines that were in a continual state of decay (in fact, every time you use them they are literally falling apart), seemed silly.  That they also produced pollution (both in operation and manufacture) and were generally quite wasteful put them further from my mind.  I ended up leaving mechanics and my love of vehicles behind and going into I.T. after university for those reasons.

Shop Class as Soulcraft:
if you enjoyed Zen and the Art of
Motorcycle Maintenance, you'll
love this read!

I'd been teaching English for a number of years when I had an opportunity to switch to computer engineering.  I ended up going back to school to get my teaching qualifications as a computer technology teacher.  At that training my instructor put me on to Shop Class as Soulcraft.  Suddenly, here was a deep, insightful argument against academics for the sake of academics and a profound argument for why you should not only exercise, but celebrate your manual technical skills.  Those skills are what can ground our intelligence and give it meaning in the world around us.

You sometimes hear the term, 'it's academic' - meaning it doesn't matter in the real world.  If you've spent any time in institutions of higher learning, you've probably noticed how insular and self serving they are.  The value they assign to academics is generated entirely by the people involved, there are no subjective criteria.  When you tie intelligence to something in the real world, the real world will cruelly and repeatedly correct assumptions that would otherwise happily exist in academia.

Having real-world hardened technical expertise is a very different thing than a background in academia.  One is relentless and demanding, the other political and collaborative.  As long as you tow the line in academia, you generally do well.  You can tow the line all you want in engineering, but if you don't submit to the demands of reality you won't get anywhere, no matter how well you get on with your colleagues.

I find I'm able to integrate the intellectual muscle developed in university with my manual skills very effectively; they aren't concordant, they're complimentary, but the idea that what I'm working on is in a constant state of entropy still bothers me.  The very best you can hope for with a machine is to maximize the time it's operational before it inevitably fails.  I missed the perfection and timelessness of ideas found in academia.

A meditative mindset in the wind.

Like Pirsig in Zen, I often find myself ruminating while I ride.  The complex machine interaction, balance and awareness needed to operate a motorcycle sets your mind in motion, but leaves your intuition free to chase down ideas.  I write better after I've been riding because my brain is full of meditative juices.

On our recent ride around Lake Huron, I was pondering this idea of entropy.  I'm in my late forties now and the concept of entropy no longer applies to just machines.  I'm watching everyone get older and struggle with the inevitable.  Entropy isn't just a state in machines, it's how reality works.  Everything is in the process of disintegrating, the trick is to dance gracefully in the decay.  Holding back the inevitable is what life is, and if I can perform that life affirming act by resurrecting an old bike, or replacing a failed component in an injured machine, it's not a wasted effort.  Perhaps that is part of the joy I feel when I see an older vehicle on the road long after it should have gone to scrap; it's a symbol of defiance against the inevitable.

***

Do not go gentle into that good night
Dylan Thomas, 1914 - 1953

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.


William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
       THE SECOND COMING

    Turning and turning in the widening gyre
    The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
    Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
    The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    Are full of passionate intensity.

    Surely some revelation is at hand;
    Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
    The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
    When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
    Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
    A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
    A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
    Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
    Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

    The darkness drops again but now I know
    That twenty centuries of stony sleep
    Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
    And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

    Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Samurai Jack & The Mountain

The journey's the thing - if you've got 20 minutes and 

haven't seen this before, it's worth the time (and two bucks).