Taoist Biking Defined

If I’m going to call myself the Taoist Biker, I have to be able to at least attempt to explain what I mean by motorcycle Taoism, right?

I hope not, but what the hell, I love a challenge. But to get to the lesson, first I have to tell a little story: the brief history of my career as a motorcyclist-without-a-motorcycle.

When I was a kid, I rode my bicycle all over the place. I loved that feeling of freedom to go and do and see with whatever time I had to myself. I was only limited by two things: the time it took me to get from one place to another, and my ability to huff and puff and pedal up and down the hills in tar-melting Virginia summertime.

The first time I saw a friend with a minibike, at an age probably around five or six, my eyes grew like dinner plates.

You can ride that thing? And NOT PEDAL? This was…well, my childish mind didn’t contain the concept “orgasmic,” but that’s what it was.

My mother had worked for years in the local country doctor’s office, however, and had seen her fair share of broken bones from dirt bike accidents. She put her foot down. No bike-o for me-o.

But my little brain wrapped itself so tightly around that image of a little 50cc Honda that all sorts of subconscious thoughts were embedded within it. As I grew older, I never overcame that fascination with two-wheels-plus-power. As an adolescent, dirt bikes; as a teenager, Harley-Davidson cruisers; as a young adult, Ducati Monsters and other naked standard bikes; as an adult, hell, just about anything but especially touring and sport-touring bikes from the Honda Interceptor, the Yamaha FJR, various BMW’s, all the way up to the big daddy Gold Wings.

My first (and thus far, only) motorcycle was a mixture of fun and practicality: a naked Suzuki SV, a 650cc 90-degree V-twin. Relatively inexpensive and easy to maintain (unlike the Ducati I lusted after) but still with enough oomph to put a stupid smile on my face every time I twisted the throttle.

For me, this was a dream come true. A childhood dream that I was living. I used to mow my lawn, walk by the window in the garage, see it shining through the glass, and feel a swell of pride. After at least fifteen years of hoping and dreaming, I finally had a little piece of fantasy sitting right there in my garage, leaned next to my son’s little training-wheeled bicycle.

Then I crashed it.

It sucked.

But I learned several things from the crash. First and foremost was that I was, while not riding ridiculously for the conditions, at least pushing beyond my comfort zone in an attempt to live up to some image of myself that I wanted to create. Dumb.

I also learned how unhealthy it was for me to put so much of my identity and self-image into a tangible object that might be taken away by circumstance or criminals.

Most importantly, however, losing the motorcycle and having to live without it for a number of years taught me a crucial lesson that, in the years since I first saw that minibike, I had forgotten. And that is this: properly, a motorcycle is just a tool. Even motorcycling is just a concept. The good feelings that I longed for did not reside in a pile of steel, aluminum, and rubber. Those feelings exist both within me and within my environment. The motorcycle and motorcycling are just the tool and the practice of getting in touch with those feelings.

Like nothing I’ve ever known, motorcycling allows a dichotomy of focus that is difficult to explain. On the one hand, your thoughts are tightly concentrated on your immediate surroundings as you monitor traffic, the road surface, your gauges, the feel of the bike as it moves beneath you, and any number of external stimuli to gauge their meaning in terms of your progress and safety during the ride. Biologists sometimes note that fish don’t fall off cliffs and therefore fish didn’t need to develop certain instincts to survive; similarly, car drivers don’t fall down and so don’t have to monitor as many factors just to keep safely moving along.

At the same time, as you travel on a motorcycle you are pulled from the enclosed, temperature-controlled and HEPA-filtered glass box of an automobile interior and placed into your environment where there is no separation between “out there” and “in here.” To borrow a phrase from Asian thought, the separation between “me” and “not-me” breaks down. You experience your environment in a direct fashion that is unusual for modern Westerners: on a bicycle, much of your energy is devoted toward the physical effort of keeping moving; in a car, the combination of the boxed-in phenomenon and the decreased demands on one’s attention create a detached sort of travel that is as different from motorcycling as a photograph is to an IMAX movie.

The result is that one half of the motorcyclist’s mind is constantly hyperfocused, engaged in analyzing the environment’s concrete aspects, while the other half is left free to revel in that environment in the abstract. For me, that resulted in an ongoing conversation between the halves of my brain that went something like this:

(Analytical half): Speed, 60mph. Gear, 6th. Check mirrors. Watch for traffic.
(Free-form half): Wow, that breeze feels nice. Look at the flowers over there under the shade where those three oak trees stand in the field. That’s so beautiful.
(Analytical half): Curve approaching. Sign: 35mph.
(Free-form half): Woo, this is gonna be fun.
(Analytical half): Clutch, match revs, downshift, brake, clutch out.
(Free-form half): Damn, I love that rev-down exhaust note!
(Analytical half): Clutch, match revs, downshift, clutch out, match revs, downshift, clutch out, brake. Gear, 3rd. Speed: 29mph.
(Free-form half): I love this section of road, it brings back fond memories of old roads back home. Ooh, curve! Here we go!
(Analytical half): Look ahead for traffic. Scan road surface for debris. Choose my apex. Throttle on. Look through turn to exit.
(Free-form half): [roller-coaster mode] Wheeeeeeeee!
(Analytical half): Rolling on throttle, exiting turn. Whoops, dog in the front yard. Cover the front brake. Prepare evasive maneuvers.
(Free-form half): Hey, it’s a kid in the front yard. Wave to the kid, hey bud!
(Analytical half): Dog made no move, proceed with acceleration. Upshift, check mirrors, check tach. Speed, 45mph.
(Free-form half): It’s so much cooler here in the shade than back there 200 feet in the sun. Oh, hell, what’s that smell? Damn, roadkill. Ugh. Surprised that dog back there hasn’t dragged it off yet.
(Analytical half): Upshift, look ahead for traffic, watch for objects in road. Speed, 57mph.
(Free-form half): That house is kind of cool. I wish I could take a picture of it, but somebody might get pissed if I stopped in the road to do it.

And so on and so forth.

Ultimately, the pursuit of motorcycling Taoism is the pursuit of this feeling, of being in the moment and experiencing one’s environment, minute by minute, on both levels of consciousness: the abstract and the concrete. That is why I say that a motorcycle is not necessary. It’s the pursuit of a feeling of oneness with the experience that is important.

But, in my experience, a motorcycle sure helps.