“We carry ourselves wherever we go and we cannot
escape temptation by mere flight.”
–
Amma Matrona
Are motorcycles getting too
big? Or am I just getting too old to
want to man-handle 800+ pounds of metal and plastic? Or is it something else entirely – am I at a
point in life where I see my journey more about discarding than obtaining?
In the Christian tradition,
Lent is the period prior to Easter and is meant to be a time of
personal examination and reflection, not unlike Ramadan in Islam or Yom Kippur
in Judaism. My own disciplines include fasting
and I often engage in spring cleaning, both spiritual and physical. In other words I try to lighten the load.
But each year I look at my house and I
wonder, “How the hell did I ever accumulate so much stuff?”
Each year I lay awake at night reflecting
on hurtful actions performed and good deeds left undone, and I wonder, “How the
hell did my soul accumulate so much stuff?”
And I now look at motorcycles
laden with more and more, and wonder: “How the hell did these bikes become
loaded with so much stuff?”
Each summer I take a long
ride of several thousand miles and part of the joy is the escape from stuff – physical
and otherwise – that I carry around with me each and every day. I find it a delightful challenge each year to
carry less baggage, to determine just how little I can get by on for the time
on the road. And after many years I have
learned that I can get by on a whole lot less than I would have imagined.
It has occurred to me that it
is time that I start getting by on a whole lot less of the emotional baggage I
carry around as well. Not the memories,
good or bad, which help make me a better person, but the attachment of guilt or
pride appended to those memories. Both weigh
me down and prevent me from living fully in the moment, experiencing the moment
as it is rather than colored by past successes and failures. To just see, to just breathe, and to just
hear without analysis or dissection or compartmentalization … isn’t that authentic freedom?
And motorcycling is supposed to
be about freedom, right? But how can you be free if you are laden with stuff inside and out?
In like fashion over the
years I have come to appreciate the slow maneuvering of a motorcycle; any fool can twist the wrist and go fast in a straight
line. It takes real skill to handle a
heavy bike through narrow spaces at 5 MPH.
So as with the baggage I carry, in the midst of an ever faster world of
bits and gigabytes and micro-speeds that allow stock to be manipulated
by greedy traders, I am at a time of life when I wish to slow down, for only in
going slow can I see, breathe, and hear.
So maybe I need to listen again to the Eagles:
Well I'm runnin' down the road trying to loosen my load ...
Lighten up while you still can
don't even try to understand
Just find a place to make your stand
and take it easy.
