That's No Bull!

It was along Highway 50 in Nevada - "America's Loneliest Road" - that I pulled into the sho' nuff' honest-to-God old fashioned roadhouse. You just don't see those any more, and after a hot and dry hundred and fifty miles and a visit to the Shoe Tree (which I have learned was just cut down by vandals), I was ready for a break and some lunch.

The building was a Hollywood set and the staff was right out of central casting: the barkeep was a skinny, bowlegged cowboy with a handlebar mustache on his face and a "Howdy" on his lips. The cook was a pretty little gal with a ready smile and a fast hand on the grill. I sat down and ordered a burger and a root beer and with a "Comin' right up" the slab was on the fire and the taters in the grease. By the way, you can call me a sissy but I follow the "no booze when you are riding on two wheels" rule, as given the number of cagers out there who seem to have as their singular purpose in life the goal of running me over, I have enough diffculty staying alive without adding my alcohol addled brain to the mix.

So I drank my sody, watched Ms. Grill Gal work her magic on my meal and listened as a city slicker hit on her. There was some construction going on down the road and some pretty boys from DownTown were pretending to be roughnecks. Funny. She handled him with grace and charm and the song "Brandy" by Looking Glass kept going through my mind (listen to it at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-tRXewCAmU). Following this delightful entertainment my meal came, I chowed down with gusto, and had fun people-watching as other folks slowly drifted in.

After licking my plate clean of any possible trace of french fries (a rare treat for this middle-aged, pre-hypertensive white boy) it was time for this Mysterious Stranger to empty his bladder, wash his hands, and head off into the Sunset.

I asked Cowboy Bob behind the bar to direct me towards the toilet; he pointed to the next room and said "It's just behind the pool table, to the left." So I headed on over to the next room, opened the door to the left of the pool table and just as I stepped in I thought to myself, "Funny, there's a bull on that door over there but this one here has a cow on it."


You ever those moments when even as the brain is screaming important information you still go ahead and do something stupid? Those moments are getting more frequent for me - I guess as you age the doggone processor slows down.

So of course as the door closed behind me I was standing in a sparkling clean, pink-frilly, not a friggin'-urinal-in-sight bathroom. I had, in all my leather clad, motorcycle riding, masculine glory, just stepped into the ladies room, clearly marked by a sign with a Cow ... not a Bull.


Merde.


Great. City-boy don't know the difference between a cow and a bull. Except he does, having been shipped out to a farm for a year. But that doesn't do any good if city-boy's perspective is different from Cowboy Bob. My understanding of "behind the pool table" was different from that of the proprietor of the establishment and I had just followed instructions ... obviously incorrectly, much to my consternation.

I now had a decision to make: stay and go, or go and go. Scheise. I thought to myself, "I'm here and nothing's going to change that fact - I can't unmake my decision. And how much worse could it get (I made sure to lock the door to avoid it getting any worse)?" So I lifted the seat (wife and daughter's have trained me well), finished the business at hand, flushed and closed the seat and lid (did I ever say how scared I am of wife and daughters?), stalled for time as I washed my hands and then finally opened the lock and prepared to walk into a room full of smirking derision.

But nothing happened. No looks, no laughs, no snarky comments, not even a glance my way. And as I moseyed out the door (you always mosey in a western Roadhouse), I was reminded of two things: 1) generally speaking, most people don't give a hoot about the dumb stuff you do so long as it ain't dangerous; 2) clear communication is EVERYTHING!

Relative to number 1, most of us worry a great deal about things that just don't matter. Because our world revolves around us, we assume that everyone else's world revolves around us as well. But it just ain't so ... their worlds revolve around them, so about 999.9 times out of 1000, other folks really aren't paying attention.

As to number 2, when training in grad school we role-played techniques for establishing clarity in communication: repeating, re-phrasing, double and even triple checking .... all to make sure that we really understood what the other person was saying. We practiced these technique because communication is actually a very complicated process involving numerous opportunities for screw up between what is actually meant and what is heard and understood. Language, perspective, inflection ... a million tiny concepts go into communicating effectively, and if any of those gets misunderstood, the whole thing gets wacky. Even something as simple as walking into the correct restroom.

Kind of like the NASA project a few years ago, when they forgot to convert metric measurements into SAE measurements and missed their target by - oh, about a million miles!

This was a great reminder of how important clarity in communication really is, whether one is at the negotiating table, trying to understand another's point of view, or just trying to find a toilet.

So, stomach full, bladder empty, dignity somewhat rumpled and humility re-established, I continued my mosey to the bike, fired it up, DID NOT drop it in the parking lot and headed on down the road, laughing at my own foibles and thankful for a beautiful day. You see, if on any given day the worst communicaton error you make is to walk into the wrong toilet, it's a heck of a good day.

Not All Who Wander are Lost

... that is a bumper sticker given to me some years ago in recognition of my joy in traveling unguided, with only the foggiest of destinations in mind and little in the way of navigational equipment. This in spite of the fact that my proclivity for directional confusion is well known in my family. Take my wife blindfolded to any state in the Union, spin her around, and she can find north. I have a hard time finding north with a compass on a sunny day and have pretty much been lost everyplace in the US and many places in Europe. But I always find my way home.

It's kind of like the story attributed to the frontiersman Davy Crockett who, when asked if he had ever been lost, replied: "No, but I was a might be-wildered for three days one time."

We live in an age where one should never get lost, what with MapQuest, Google, Smart Phones and GPS. But not all who wander are lost ... and not all who follow the soft voice transmitted from a GPS are found. I read a study that says we humans tend to respond in a positive fashion to a human voice and thus are wont to do whatever the voice says, in spite of all evidence suggesting that so to do can lead to disaster. Add this to the fact that we are dependent upon technologies and you have some of the most bone-headed moves imaginable, like driving into a canal in front of you, down private roads clearly marked "DANGER" and turning into trees because the voice told you to Turn Right, Now!

The truth is that as humans we have developed automatic responses for dealing with the vast amount of information that comes our way; we cannot possibly process it all in such a way as to keep us safe, and so we default to tried and true methods of coping. But by so doing we often become captive to our creations, and they slowly begin to create us. The more embedded we become to technologies like GPS the less able we are to be reflective about their impact on us. The end becomes pre-determined by the means.

This is not a diatribe against modern technology or the use of GPS! There are times when it is great to simply plug a destination into to your GPS and get a route. And although I have heard horror stories to the contrary, I have found MapQuest to be pretty accurate.

But when I hit the road every summer, I just want to wander a bit. I have found some of the neatest people and places, seen some great sites and had wonderful conversations, when I was "lost." Lots of fascinating sites are not listed in any guidebook, like the broken down and shuttered bar in Mississippi where I stopped to eat my lunch one day and discovered a plaque on the wall, rusty and dusty, announcing that the birth of a famous blues group began right there. Or the fellow in some grease spot in New Mexico, who drank his malt liquor at 8 AM and told me about how he had kicked Troy Donahue's ass back in the 1950's for making a pass at his wife. Cool stuff ... and it never would have happened if I had not wandered into those places.

There is a time to be found and a time to be lost ... we just have to discern the difference.

TC Bank- Dream Rangers

If picture is worth 1,000 words, then this short video is worth more than I can write in a lifetime; it is the heart of Mu-shin Riding! Dream on ...

Slow in, Quick out

I am one of those folks who likes to head into a new project at full throttle. When starting a new job I am energized and excited and generally spend an incredible amount of time and energy reading, learning, reflecting, developing a plan, and then acting. And generally that approach has served me well.

But as with so many strategies in life, a quick entry is not always the best approach. Sometimes you have to take it slow (what ever that might mean within a particular context), ease into the project, and then accelerate out. That is particularly true when you are entering some unknown territory, just like you do when riding through a curve.

Twenty-five percent of all motorcycle accidents involve only a single vehicle (nothing but the motorcycle) and 3/4 of those accidents involved over-braking or sliding the bike on the road, generally in a curve. Stated simply that means that the dirver entered the curve way too hot, panicked, grabbed the brake, and ended up in "collision with a fixed object" (DOT speak for "on a beautiful day with no one around the idiot was not paying attention and rammed his bike against the guardrail-road-telephone pole-etc.").

One of the most exciting parts of riding a bike is taking the curves at speed; there is a definite adrenalin rush as you lean the bike into the curve. That's fun. But there is also a rush when you smack your face onto the pavement or freak out and fixate on that wall that is drawing ever closer. That's stupid. The only real pucker moment I have had riding at speed was when I was getting cocky and entered a curve way too hot and realized that I needed more lean in the bike than my skills would probably allow me to achieve. I started looking at the wall as it got closer and closer, and it was only through the shear discipline affected by the teaching from good instructors that I tore my eyes away from the wall, looked down the road, and arrived home safe and sound ... though not without a bathroom stop prior ...

Over and over again instructors hammer into us: Slow in, Quick out. Watch the pros and you see this pattern every few seconds as they run the course. And these are the big boys and girls, folks with incredible skill riding machines that have been tested and re-tested and fine-tuned to travel safely at maximum lean through curves. But they slow down (relatively speaking) as they enter and then accelerate out of the curve: Slow in, Quick out. Experience has taught them the prudence and pragmatism of this approach, as if you want to win you have to finish, and a crash is not the kind of finish that leads to winning. It's a long race which is won not in any single curve but in prudent control of many curves.

And in normal riding, Slow in means paying very close attention to the posted speed limits for curves; they are not posted there just to piss people off or in an attempt to reduce personal freedom, but to keep everyone as safe as possible. The regulations are there to help, not hurt.

One of the hardest things to teach anyone who is excited about his/her profession is Slow in, Quick out. Most of us, when we come out of our educational programs, think we know it all (or just about all of it) and are ready to take on the world. Certainly this is true for clergy and I suspect the same principle applies to all professions; we are ready to go and tend to enter very quickly, certain that we can handle it. And sooner or later we find that we are moving way to fast for our abilities and either get lucky and avoid a crash ... or not. In my own life it has taken a long, long time to learn how to apply the principle of Slow in, Quick out to my profession. It's a long race which is won not in any single curve but in prudent control of many curves.

I personally believe that a contributing factor to the current economic crisis is the failure to apply this Slow in, Quick out concept appropriately. In an ever accelerating material world the demand for enormous and immediate profit over-ruled prudence and any sense of long range thinking. Enter fast and Exit faster seemed to be the operant norm. And riders of any skill level will testify that sooner or later you over reach with only one option left: a crash.

In riding it's one thing to make choices that - at least theoretically - involve only your own life. I say theoretically because the truth is that we all exist in relationship and any decision I make will have an effect on others. And ultimately there is no excuse for making choices that involve the lives of other innocent folk, like passengers, other riders, some guy walking his dog, or anyone else on the road. Such reckless behavior is immoral, all protestations of individual freedom aside. My freedom ends where it impacts the freedom of another, and crashing into someone else is a definite impact.

The reckless behavior of large businesses and the dismantling of appropriate reguations designed to protect people led to a crash from which many of the drivers emerged relatively unscathed even as they left others devastated in their wake. It is as though the rider of a motorcycle entered a curve far faster than safe for circumstances, hit a slick spot and went into a slide, but was able to dismount the bike as it careened through a crowd of people. Slightly scruffed up they could yell that the slick spot was not their fault (or that 'somebody' should have posted a warning!) and escape prosecution even as their insurance paid for the replacement of the bike. It is irresponsible and immoral but perfectly legal.

Slow win, Quick out. That's what not only wins the long race but keeps others safe as well.

Perishable Skills

Every rider will tell you that getting a motorcycle running at high speed in a straight line is not a problem - all the dynamics of physics and engineering reinforce the natural desire of a bike to head in a straight line. Within five minutes I can teach anyone who is able to ride a bicycle how to control the throttle, clutch and brake and get rolling down the road.

Slow speed manuevers on the other hand, are where we separate those who love to ride from the weekend warriors, since at slow speed one loses all those wonderful dynamic forces which keep you upright while roaring down the road at full throttle. So those who love to ride and seek to improve ability (and thereby increase average life expectancy) constantly train at what are referred to as "perishable" skills.

Perishable skills are just what they sound like; skills which although once learned and perhaps even mastered, perish over time without practice. One would think, "How hard can it be to make a u-turn on a little motorcycle?'" And the answer, from every rider who has grabbed brake and fallen, or had to stop and push the bike back in what is in effect a three point turn, is: "Harder than you imagine!"

Because the dynamics of speed, gyroscopic and centrifugal forces disappear and are replaced by gravity, it requires great finesse to turn a 750 pound beast (or a 400 lb lightweight for that matter) at slow speed without dropping it because the bike's natural tendency is to fall in the direction of the turn, which is helpful when navigating a curve at 5o MPH but a real pain when trying to manuever around a parking lot at 5 MPH.

So at every opportunity I practice u-turns, tight circles, stop & goes, or swerves. The Church is located in dowtown Bellevue, WA next to a big parking lot and every morning before I park the bike for the day I make it a point to perform several u-turns between parking spaces and tight circles around a light post. No doubt observers wonder if I have lost my mind but it is a simple and convenient way to keep up my skills. And having dumped my bike on more than a few occasions at slow speed (once even standing still, before I had turned the engine on), I figure I need to keep up my skills!

And I wonder what other skills I possess that are perishable without practice? Listening, for example. Not just hearing but really listening, with all my senses. Or caring. If you don't care long enough, can you reach a point where you can't care? And playing; how long has it been since I just played with no worry about scores, or winning or losing?

We are given so many gifts and so many abilitie. I wonder how many we squander for lack of practice ...