Since one of the things I love best is riding, I end up thinking a lot about it and about why I do it and why I like it. It seems to be one of those things that mystifies a lot of people.
How many times have you been told how hazardous it is? Bikes are unstable, You don't have any protection. Drivers can't see you. If you go down you can die from the road rash even if you don't break anything. It goes on and on. The endless list of horrors. The stories about somebody who such and so knew who spent 6 months in traction, got turned into a vegetable, whatever.
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Well, it's all true. There are reasons why insuring your ride is expensive. Mostly having to do with healing costs and theft, I expect. But this is one of those odd ways of viewing the world that habitancy use to put down the things they aren't curious in doing.
One certainty is that nobody's getting out of here alive. And it can happen at any occasion in any kind of situation from nearly any activity. Life is not safe. Living isn't about being safe. You going to give up eating because something could get stuck in your throat and kill you?
Still, riding is dangerous, and untrained reckless fools often have a short career - or run straight through a lot of bikes if they're very lucky and can afford not to learn how to ride.
Even the best riders can get taken out by a bad compound of events. But so can a driver in a cage or a pedestrian. Things happen. No guarantees.
Unlike a new motorcycle, life is not under warranty. I need to be reminded of that from time to time and to learn, over and over, how to live with uncertainty. Riding brings it home.
Riding a bike has a whole of virtues that are sensible and common - you save on gas, you can park approximately everywhere with no trouble, they're relatively uncostly compared to a car, even the assurance can be less than a car, they are less high-priced to utter and repair. Nice sane virtues, eh?
Let's just skip the downside and get to the real reasons for riding. It's hazardous and makes you feel alive. A lot of sports are hazardous and that's a part of the thrill. easily feeling your heart beat and the adrenaline rush is kind of addictive. Most parts of our lives are safe, sane, cautious and/or plain flat out boring. It's hard to feel alive in a cocoon.
But even running an errand can bring you back to life - if you ride. A car is just other cage (car fanatics will disagree, but something with 4 or more wheels just doesn't do the trick) and while they're great for carrying a ton of groceries and all the kids, they're mostly like sofas on wheels. You know, get in your cage, roll up all the windows, turn on the air or heat, jack up the 24 speaker cd system and float away. Get totally insulated from the world around you.
On a bike you are embedded in the world. You know you're on a engine - and you are on it not wrapped up inside it. You are embedded in the machine, you're the bike's brain and your whole body is involved in development it all work. This is very dissimilar than driving a car (racers excepted, of course). Sure you can ride a bike and be absent which does cause a lot of mishaps, but normally the ride demands that you pay attention, that you stay in the present, in the now of you, bike and road.
Too few things request that kind of attention and presence. We easily should live every second fully present, fully awake, fully there. But we don't. We spend too many hours disconnected or plugged into a pseudo-reality.
The ride teaches me again to wake up and be there. It embeds me in the real world around me. I sense it, hear it, feel it and flow with it. The very best rides are a spiritual experience that can be impossible to characterize or by comparison to anyone who doesn't already get it. There's a meditative ability to riding and a cleansing of the trash that accumulates in our heads. For me these are the real reasons I ride. Riding makes my life (and my head) work better.
Ride to live - live to ride. It's a lot more than transportation.
Copyright 2005 Richard Keir
Embedded in the Ride
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