Peace Love Moto - Where Motorcycling meets Mindfulness
Explore the art of riding with purpose. Hosted by a professional Colorado Rocky Mountain tour guide, Peace Love Moto is your weekly guide to Mindful Motorcycling and finding your Zen on two wheels.
Time doesn’t crawl on a motorcycle the way it does behind a desk. One minute you’re carrying the noise of the world in your helmet, and the next you’re 50 miles out with a quiet mind and a clock that makes no sense. That “time stands still” moment is real for many riders, and I wanted to understand why it shows up so reliably on long rides.
We unpack the psychology behind it, including the time paradox of memory: when your days are repetitive, your brain stops creating fresh memory anchors, so routine can feel painfully slow while you’re living it, yet strangely empty when you look back. Then we flip the camera to the rider’s view. Motorcycling forces total attention through a nonstop sensory stream: balance, lean angle, wind, scanning, surface changes, and constant micro-decisions. When every part of your brain is focused on staying upright and aware, the internal timekeeper can fade into the background and anxiety loses its grip. Call it flow state, call it mindfulness, call it the zone, it’s one of the healthiest “weird tricks” your brain can pull.
I also bring in Neil Peart, legendary Rush drummer, lyricist, and devoted long-distance motorcycle traveler. His song “Time Stand Still” captures that touring rider’s urge to freeze the frame and really see the people and places around you, not to escape life, but to live it more fully.
If you’ve ever felt the road moving through you, you’ll recognize yourself here. Subscribe, share this with a riding buddy, and leave a review on Apple Podcasts so more riders can find the show.
There is a very specific, let's call it an event, that happens on every long ride. A special moment. It's kind of strange. Whether it's a couple of hours in the saddle or a cross-country ride of several days, that feeling is almost always the same. And it's when time stands still. Again, at least for me, it seldom happens within the first 50 miles or so. And I don't know why exactly. I guess it's just because in the first 50 miles, we're still carrying the weight of the world that we're trying to roll away from. You're regretting checking the latest news headlines before you left home. Such insanity sometimes. That's my big failure, checking the news headlines before a ride. Gotta stop doing that. And maybe you're just getting started on this ride and you're thinking about the bills waiting to be paid and the deadlines breathing down your neck when you get back to work, and or the boss who you would swear just has it in for you. All that crap running through your mind over and over again, yeah, it's still there when you start this motorcycle ride. And then you're about 50 miles into it. Maybe a hundred, maybe it takes 200 on this ride, but that destructive chatter inside your helmet just goes quiet. Yeah, it's so strange. It's like the road stops coming at you and starts moving through you. You look down at the clock on your bike and you realize it's been two or three or even four hours, and it's just that time has just vanished. You look at the empty road ahead, and it feels like the entire universe has paused just to let you glide across its surface. Yeah, that's weird. And this just can't be real. Or can it?
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.
You know that feeling? Considered a weird trick our brains play on us. For example, eight hours working behind a desk, going through emails, instant messages from colleagues, and attending video meetings, time just crawls at this agonizing slow pace. But spend that same eight hours on your motorcycle? It's just like this blur of relaxation, of happiness, if you're lucky, of joy. That doesn't feel like time spent at all. And in psychology, they have they have a term for that. They call this the time paradox of memory. Interesting. When your daily routine is, let's call it boring or repetitive, your brain saves energy by ignoring that repetitive input. For example, your commute over the same route to work, you drink from the same mug, then you get to work and you look at the same screen. Your brain doesn't bother creating new memory anchors, as they call it. As a result, the hours just drag on and on and on. But oddly enough, there's this term called shrinking. It's like the brain doesn't retain that time that you spent focused upon it. It shrinks to nothing, as they say. And you you can't remember anything that you did over that time that was so boring. Isn't that weird? But
put yourself on a motorcycle and the complete reverse happens. Because as you know, riding a motorcycle demands total focus. That's a given. Consider the sensory storm that your brain processes every second when you're riding. The subtle lean angle in your inner ear adjusts against the gust of a crosswind without you even thinking about it. The scanning reflex of your eyes constantly picking up everything happening in front of you and from side to side. And if you're like me, I'm always thinking about and adjusting for the best possible engine performance for any conditions. So most of us do a lot of that without even thinking about it. So that being said, here's the really cool part that I just learned about, and I'm just now maybe able to comprehend. Riding our motorcycles, our brains are flooded with real-time sensory inputs, right? That we can agree on, right? And because every single neuron in your brain is committed to keeping you upright and alive in every millisecond, your internal clock actually disconnects. That's what I've learned. In other words, your brain kind of stops accounting for time. But of course, it keeps going. So yeah, this is way over my head. Again, I know it's weird, and maybe I'm not describing it well, but that's essentially what happens. Here's another angle, though, on that idea. You, as a functional human being, literally cannot process the past, the present, and the future at the same time. That feeling that time is standing still, it isn't an illusion at all. It's your brain hitting the pause button on anxiety and other distractions so that you can not only survive, but you can fully experience this beautiful thing called a motorcycle ride. And if you're lucky, you go into the zone, right? Which we also call mindful motorcycling. So aren't you glad that you have a passion for something that does those weird things to your brain with no drugs or alcohol involved at all?
Neil Peart. To the world, Neil was one of the best rock drummers of all times. A lot of people didn't know that he also wrote the lyrics for the band Rush that he played in. But to our motorcycling community, Neil is also a long-distance motorcycle rider who wrote his BMW hundreds of thousands of miles across North America, Europe, and Africa. And long before he wrote his famous motorcycle memoir called Ghost Rider, which we've talked about in the past, Neil pinned the lyrics to a track in Russia's 1987 album called Hold Your Fire. The name of that song is Time Stand Still. And what's cool is that he put that not only into his memoirs, but also into the songs that were sung by Rush Getty Lee. Time stands still. I'm not looking back, but I want to look around me now. Time stands still to see more of the people and the places that surround me now. I think that Neil Peart captures the inexpressible desire for many touring riders. The desire to freeze the frame. To look at horses standing in a green pasture beneath an approaching thunderstorm in South Dakota. Neil later reflected on how riding long distances served as both an escape from time and a way to confront it. Yet your soul feels perfectly still, perfectly calm, even at these frightful speeds.
So here's a thought. Instead, riding a motorcycle is about diving so deeply into the present moment, experiencing mindfulness on a motorcycle, that time finally stops slipping through your fingers. So next time you head out for a ride, whether it's just a short ride or a long solo ride, whether it's just for an afternoon or an entire week or an entire month, pay attention. Notice how the world slows down when you give it your undivided focus. Put on Russia's time standstill and listen closely and let Neil Peart remind you why we take to the road in the first place. Not to cheat time, not to escape, but to truly live.
As always, hey, I thank you very much for listening. And if you enjoy this podcast, thanks for giving us a review on Apple Podcasts and for telling your friends, hey, and if you'd like to support the show in other ways too, just check the show notes for some options there. And until we visit again, hey, let time stand still. See if you can figure out why when you go for a ride. But just do go for a ride. Have fun out there, take care of yourself and take care of other people because they're all around you all the time. Peace out.
