Overwhelmed By Modern Life

Ron 0:09

In our world today, we're just so often overwhelmed, aren't we? We live our lives in this constant state of saturation. Notifications, schedules, addiction to social media, the 24-hour news cycle. Yeah, that endless scrolling that captures whatever attention span you have left after a long day. It's that wall of noise that follows us from the minute we wake up to the minute we close our eyes. We just find ourselves overwhelmed, burned out. We know too that the weight of those stresses are not good for us to carry 24 by 7. We're not made for that. And sometimes we've just got to get some relief. And you know the truth as well as I do. Living under too much stress for too long is not good for us. It's not good for our health. But my motorcycling family, there's a solution out there. An option that we can turn to that's productive. A solution, an escape, you may say, that's very, very good for us. An escape that's probably right there in your garage. There is a place where the noises of our life become silent. A place where the world shrinks down to a country lane or an open highway. A place where, at least for a little while, the chaos of life pauses and all is right with the world. A place where we can remove the clutter coming in from our eyes and our ears that drive us completely crazy and replace that with all the good. Today, we're talking about the art of subtraction and the clarity that we can find simply by stopping, taking a breath, clearing our mind, and of course, go for a ride. Where at least for a little while, we subtract all the bad vibes in our life, and we make room for the good vibes. The hippies called it tuning out, but for us, it's more like tuning in. Without any mind-altering additives at all, you and I can take ourselves to a good place, a happy place, a place free of destructive stresses. That, for many of us, that happy place is just a motorcycle ride away. Let's go there together.

The Motorcycle As Escape

Ron 2:53

Stay tuned. Recorded in beautiful, loveliness, Colorado, welcome to Peace Love Moto, the podcast for motorcyclists seeking that peaceful, easy feeling as we cruise through this life together. Are you ready? Let's go. Not the where, the destinations are great, definitely, but the why. And I realize that it's because, just like many of us, we kind of need that motorcycle ride. I know I do. We need that escape because our life off the bike can sometimes get really complicated. Trying to juggle careers and relationships, and we're trying to figure out what the future holds for this AI world that's growing so fast all around us. Yeah, we're trying to plan for a future, we have no idea what it's going to look like. We're constantly multitasking. And as I've learned, the human brain craves patterns, but modern life gives us chaos. We're just physically tired because we're so mentally tired. And we're trying to decide what do we do next? We're trying to process all these thousands of inputs at once.

Simplicity Lessons From Seinfeld

Ron 4:33

Yeah, I get that. But hold on tight for a minute. And here's a segue that I think makes sense to me. Hopefully it will to you. My wife and I watch Seinfeld three runs. We've seen them all multiple times, but we always laugh. For those of you who don't know, Seinfeld was a sitcom that ran for about nine years. It was co-created by Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld. And it's loosely based on their real-life personalities. It's this American sitcom that aired between, let's see, what did they say, 1989 and 98. So it was famously known as the show about nothing. Unlike more traditional comedies of the day that relied on some kind of character growth or some serious moments, Seinfeld did not. They had a strict rule that said no hugging, no learning. I love that. Just like Jerry Seinfeld's stand-up comedy style, the show is more about observations of life, the silliness in life. Have you ever wondered why? You know, that kind of thing. It was just a comedy with four quirky main characters, this awkward set of friends, and about their daily life. For me, it was just simple, just really funny, and most certainly genius. Maybe there is genius in the simplicity. The reason I share this about Jerry Seinfeld and the show Seinfeld is that my wife and I, we watch it to relax oftentimes. We know that we're going to see, for the most part, nothing shocking, nothing to have to think about very much. It's just funny. And as for me, I also like the cartoon SpongeBob SquarePants. Yes, I'm one of those guys. I can't begin to tell you why, but that's just my weird sense of humor. It's nothing that I have to overthink, for sure. I think three-year-olds get it too. I shared this about Seinfeld and Spongebob because they are simple. They're fairly predictable. They're funny for sure. But with these shows, there's not a lot to think about. Like I said, there's nothing shocking. There's nothing controversial. It's just funny. And again, as for me, the less shock I experience,

Retiring, Detox, And Seeing Clearly

Ron 7:11

the less controversy I have to hear about, the better. I think this new outlook that I've had lately is because I retired from my full-time job. I've mentioned this in an earlier episode that I've retired from my corporate career, and I suppose you might say I'm currently on detox. Detox from the busyness and a lot of stress that I used to live with. I've actually experienced a strange phenomenon regarding this just recently. You see, literally for decades, I was in the IT business, and my world was defined by the monitor in front of me. The spreadsheets and the endless meetings. But now, I spend so much less time in front of a computer, honestly. I am right now, obviously, but no, most of the time I'm not. And here's the strange part. My distance eyesight seems to have improved a lot. I catch myself looking across at a distant tree or across a field or a bird soaring up high, even riding the motorcycle. I can see so much better in the distance than I could before, and I'm not sure why. Now, this is an important note. I'm not absolutely sure that my vision has actually physically improved. I suspect though that it's something within me that has slowed down enough to focus better. Maybe since I've retired, my brain is finally quiet enough, and my eyes are just helping me to recognize that and pick up more detail. I don't know. It's weird. It's weird. But I think it's a good lesson for all of us. Maybe. It could be that we need to make an effort to step away from the screen and to step away from meetings when we can and to throw our leg over the motorcycle more often. We need to spend a lot more time out there in our happy place. And that whole happy place concept just kind of reminds me too of a hippie song, Aquarius. Did you know that one? In that song, it talks about this mystical crystal revelation, whatever that is, and golden living dreams of visions. And I realized that this is a song that was reflective before the time of the internet, a time before we had the entire world dictated to us through the computer screen or through our phones. It was back then we had to dream of what was possible. They couldn't imagine AI back then, I'm sure. We had to imagine the world rather than just download it or see it on our screen. When we sat and looked

Riding As Mindfulness And Flow

Ron 10:15

at the horizon back in 1969, we weren't thinking about posting it to our Facebook feed. We were just in it. And we were letting the sun shine in. Just like that song, Segues, toward the end. You'll have to listen to it. But I think that's why we ride, right? I think that the motorcycle is a bridge to a different state of mind. If you want to go that deep, and I do. When you leave the driveway and you're reclaiming your golden living vision, again, reflective on my how I think my vision has improved, you're seeing the world in your own eyes again. This fresh, new, pure vision, not something that's pixelated and filtered from your screen. Motorcycling for me creates an opportunity for mindfulness to take hold. Consider what you think about when you're riding a technical route. You're not thinking about the news, you're not thinking about your next meeting, you're not thinking about social media. In that time, in that moment of time, when you're riding, it's pure physics. And you're the writer in control over most of it, right? Speed, lean angle, trajectory through the corner. It's an equation that your fully relaxed mind can solve instinctively. Sometimes we find ourselves in trouble when we try to overthink. So when we're in that zone, we're in that flow state, the mental chatter disappears. That monkey mind finally sits down and shuts up. And I think too, this is where my brain goes when I watch a show like Seinfeld or SpongeBob. I'm not thinking about a whole heck of a lot. And when we're writing, we don't have to think about other things, also. It's just about writing, it's about moving through space. That's all we are, all we really have to think about. We're not multitasking, we're just in motion. We just are. And that's the clarity that I think most of us chase. It's about some silence in our head, which feels wonderful, and it's so needed. That rest is so needed. I think all of us are looking for that, and on this podcast, we typically call it peace of mind.

A Simple Weekly Challenge

Ron 13:12

So we'll begin to close with this, with a challenge for you this week. First, watch a TV show, a rerun that you've seen many, many times before. It's fine, just watch it. And see if you don't come away more relaxed than when you first started watching it. Then, with a totally relaxed mind, especially if it's a sunny day, do this. Test your vision. Get away from the phone and the computer screens and the TV screen. Go and look at a distant tree or a horizon line and just really look at it. How's your clarity of sight now? How's your clarity of mind? So we began this episode speaking of the word subtraction, subtracting the distractions in our lives. And I think that's what the hippies of the 1960s were talking about all along. Maybe they were

Subtraction And Farewell

Ron 14:10

right. So peace, my friends. All the best to you. And until we visit again, do write in peace.