Just some of my thoughts on motorcycling
Old Buddhists say: “Pain makes man think, thought makes man wise, and wisdom makes man more bearable.”
When I read that quote, it made me laugh – I know it’s not suppose to be funny, but it made me laugh anyway. Why should it make me laugh, you might ask? Well, life for many people is going to work, going home, and doing their ordinary chores to keep their life stable. This was how I went through much of my life for many, many years. I just lived a normal, boring life. But inside of me were dreams and desires – there was something inside me that want wanted to experience life rather than just live life.
Quite a few years ago I went to a slide presentation and lecture describing the climbing of a mountain in Antarctica, given by someone that lived just down the street from my home. The pictures of the mountains in Antarctica were spectacular, and the lecture described the difficulties, the cold and the pain the climbers endured to reach the summit. That lecture was a life changing experience for me. Soon after the lecture, I took up mountaineering. Mountaineering was difficult, painful, cold, and, at times, dangerous. But when I was climbing, I felt alive. All my senses were stimulated and it was like being in a different world – because it was a world different from the one I lived in at home.
I continued to climb for many years, until disaster struck. A good friend of mine was killed while climbing. He had taken one too many chances and paid for it with his life. Not long after that, I was in a near fatal fall while climbing. I was not injured, but I was just a few feet from falling to my death. If I had not the training or the experience of many years of climbing, I would not have been able to stop my slide across the ice and over the edge of a cliff. That near fall was another life changing experience for me. I continued to climb for a while, but the excitement I received from climbing was now different. Climbing had lost some of its appeal. I eventually gave up mountaineering.
But again I felt that something was missing from my life. I began to miss the stimulation I got from climbing in the mountains. Without the excitement, challenge, and discomfort from mountain climbing, I no longer felt alive. I needed something new to help me experience life again. That’s when I found motorcycling. Specifically, long distance motorcycling. When I needed to experience the world around me, I found I could get on my motorcycle and ride for a day or for a number of days. I would go for hundreds or even thousands of miles on my motorcycle. There would be many hours of riding in the saddle, focusing on the road, being buffeted by the wind, smelling the trees and the highways, feeling the heat of the day and the cold at night, sometimes listening to the rain hit the visor of my helmet. It was a completely different feeling from my normal life. Instead of just sitting and looking at the world around me, I am part of the world; I am part of the environment.
But there is more to long distance motorcycling than being a part of the environment, there is another mental or spiritual component as well. When I start to feel too much stress from work or from life in general, a long ride helped to clear my mind. It is almost as if the wind blowing past me carries away all my stress. And the wind flowing through my helmet and across my face would blow away all the troubles in my mind. A kind of peace falls over me and the problems of life and the world are no longer present to me when I was riding. I especially like riding alone through the desert or on some lonely mountain road. I am alone in my own world. It is only me, alone in my helmet, riding through the wind and through the world around me. Other people and the problems of the world no longer trouble me.
The dangers and discomforts of long distance motorcycling make me think and make me keep my mind alert. For if I do not think and I am not alert, I will surely die. The physical experience of riding and the spiritual feeling it gives me makes me a happier man. And when I am happy, I am bearable.
So I guess there is something to the old Buddhists saying, “Pain makes man think, thought makes man wise, and wisdom makes man more bearable.” Maybe those old Buddhists would accept my interpretation of that saying and accept how I relate it to motorcycling.