Peace in Motion

From the moment that unknown stranger invited me into the riding clan, the road called to me, awakening nomadic genes which had lain dormant. I was born in the same year as the Federal Highway Act, which set the stage for the construction of 44,000 miles of interstate. Many of my ancestors were nomads, from Jasper Crane who boarded the ship Hector in England in 1635 and helped found New Haven, Connecticut and then Newark, New Jersey; to my great-grandfather Edwin Thomas Crane, who in 1870 as a fifteen year old orphan left the farm in Pennsylvania and walked to St. Joseph, Missouri; to my mother, Helen Maurine Crane Brown, who in the late 1920’s flew around Missouri in a bi-plane with her boyfriend and sold rides, worked on the Al-Can Highway during the Second World War, and later opened a flower shop in Gallup, New Mexico. So it is no wonder that I am a wanderer.

Hence my fifth lesson: the discovery of Peace in Motion. Sometimes it beckoned for me to ride alone and other times in the company of good friends. Sometimes I travel by motorcycle, sometimes by car, and sometimes by train or bus. But I travel.

Counselors and psychologists often recommend that individuals journal when they are going through a process of self-discovery. Certainly that is a helpful technique, and I think many people do journal - maybe this blog is a sort of journal. But I have a hunch that most men journey a great deal more than journal.

So maybe cars and motorcycles are good metaphors for men. Whether we salivate over the latest and greatest, most power-under-the-hood ever new car, or fantasize about the old first-love car of our youth, it is about journey. The former seeks to drive into the future with an illusion of new power, the latter hold on to something good, but mythic, from the past. But both are really about the current journey, just from different angles.

I’ve made a lot of road trips in my life, and basically there are two ways to make the trip: fast and furious with only the destination in mind, or slow and meandering, with only the driving having any importance. I’ve burned across America from Miami to San Francisco in three days, and I have meandered around the Southwest, Midwest and the South with no place to go and nothing but time. Both are ultimately about journey; it’s just that sometimes it is the getting there that is important, and other times it’s only the going that matters.

Sometimes on the journey we keep our eyes focused on what is ahead, like the twenty-year old, and sometimes we let someone else take the wheel and we look back on where we have been. I think a lot of fifty year-olds are taking time to look back. I know I am. And every good driver knows that you have to be smart enough to watch the road ahead AND remember to check the rear-view mirror now and then. It is appropriate to watch ahead and glance back … on any journey you gotta’ consider where you’ve been in order to decide where you want to go.

Some time you have been to places you to which you definitely desire a return; at other times you wouldn’t go back to a place for love nor money. All kinds of things blow us off track; we take a wrong turn, get a flat tire, or see a sign for the world’s largest ball of twine and decide to make a side trip. That’s often the most fun part of the trip. So there is always a need to make course corrections; where we have been has a lot of influence on where we are going, whether we admit it or not.

I am told by those who know about such things that the most stable platform is a tripod and certainly it is true that authentic spirituality, of whatever tradition, consists of three legs which in Zen are often referred to as Attitude (one’s mental state), Practice (learning and repeating the techniques), and Understanding (awareness of the principles which transcend the specific art). So I am on the road, seeking to effect attitude, practice the tradition, and ultimately obtain understanding.