Episode 67: Motorcycling and Pursuit of Perfection

Let’s just get this out in the open.  Even after more than 50 years of riding motorcycles and hundreds of thousands of miles, I still seek perfection in the way that I ride.  Do you?  Like trying to get the perfect golf swing, I’m always seeking the perfectly smooth, perfectly timed gear shift.  I can usually shift smoothly, even in situations where I feel the need to shift quickly under hard acceleration.  I’m proud of my downshifting capabilities too, but ever so often, I’ll miss the shift, like jumping between first and second quickly, accidentally popping it into neutral.  Ug, that drives me crazy.

So I’ve got to tell ya, the new motorcycles with automatic transmissions!  Honestly, I can’t stand the thought of it!  You might say, “Ron, why do you get hung up on things like that?  You drive a car with an automatic transmission.  What’s the difference?”  Well… I don’t think of driving my car as a pursuit of perfection.  But on my motorcycle when I really think about it, I’m always seeking perfection.  In corning, hitting the apex just right, in braking, with gear shifting.  Especially if another motorcycle is behind me, just like on the golf course with someone watching me tee off, I just want to look like I know what I’m doing.  

And now you’re saying “Ron, you need therapy”.  You’re probably right.  Ha ha, yeah.  But maybe you do too!  Thank you for joining me today!  Stay tuned!

OPENING

Pardon me while I ramble.  I’ve recently been re-listening to the audiobook version of “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”.  I’ve been listening to it on my all too regular flights back and forth from Denver to Dallas.  The book is deep and… strange.  It’s one of those books where I have to really relax to comprehend and it seems that with each reading, I learn something new.  

I read it originally several years ago of course because of the title, but this audio version from Audible includes multiple actors' voices, sound effects, etc…  Really well done.  Maybe we’ll have a separate episode specific to the book but quality is the theme and it's a road-trip story with a father and son and others that delves into the relationship between technology and the human condition.  Our relationship with mechanical things.

Which brings me back to the automatic transmission thing.  I know, I know, electric motorcycles are a growing trend, perhaps that’s our future and at least thus far, there are no gears that I’m aware of on an electric motorcycle, but setting that aside…. Well let’s even set motorcycling aside for a moment.

When you were a kid, did you learn to write in cursive?  I did too.  It was so hard!  All of the sweeping motions, connecting letters that didn’t look at all like the letters that we first learned to print originally.  Some of us embraced cursive though.  I remember admiring some of my classmates who learned to write in cursive so beautifully.  Even looking back at letters written by Civil War soldiers, soldiers often with very little education, but they could write in cursive so beautifully and in a language of the day that was so eloquent.  At some point, many schools stopped teaching cursive writing.  I don’t know why.  Maybe around the time those pesky personal computers were invented.  

Where am I going with this.  Well, I still enjoy writing in cursive in my little journal because I worked so hard as a kid to learn it.  Although my first little mini-bike at 11 years old had no transmission, the next many motorcycles did.  Either 1 down and 4 up, or 1 down and 5 up.  I worked so hard to learn to not stall the engine.  I was so proud of that!

I say all of this because I think yes, there is value in always seeking perfection, expecting that we’ll do everything in our lives to the best of our abilities.  Living a quality life and expecting things to go well for us if we try hard enough.  I’ve led tours in the National Park where I came home thinking that I could have been more entertaining, or I didn’t pay enough attention to some of the guests.  Then, only to read in a review in Trip Advisor where they said “that was a trip of a lifetime, we loved our guide”.  Wow, I had no idea.

There is value in understanding that we don’t have to be perfect.  With each new ride, we have the opportunity to get become a better rider but during that process, let’s just be satisfied with the fact that we’ve found something that we love.  Something that we can get better at with every mile and we can get better with a big smile on our face!  We can be proud that somehow came up with the money to buy a bike.  We have both the physical and mental capabilities to ride it.  Yeah, we may not shift perfectly every time, but really, who cares?  Besides, it’s the challenges of motorcycling, the wind, the cold, the heat, the braking, the changing gears.  All that work is what the fun is all about!

Thank you for listening!  I wish you peace. I wish you love.

Music by Dvir Silver and Zakhar Valaha from Pixabay