Riding chill streets, listening for the lessons of Zen on a motorcycle

Most mornings I climb aboard my motorcycle and set off down thin streets and wide boulevards towards the office.

The head clears, particularly when the air is chilled. Survival instincts sharpen.

The sound of the large twin-cylinder motor is a musical thing.

Tony Wright and one of the motorcycles he rides to dial down his mind to the moment.Credit: Simon Schluter

Beware, though: you’d be unwise to permit the music to lull you into a secure embrace on roads sizzling with SUVs and trucks intent on darting, or lumbering, from lane to lane at the most startling moments.

Happily, though, no matter how higgledy-piggledy the roads become, there seems always a space through which the bike can dance safely if you pay attention.

The pleasure of it frees you to dial your mind down to the moment, rather than to range across the wider state of the world, which seems often to be a good deal more chaotic than a rush-hour morning street.

How to make sense of it?

A humourless nitwit, babbling about his new-found veneration of the Ten Commandments and how they should be tacked to school walls – having himself transgressed plenty of them – waddles towards a new US presidential election with the support of a political cult that has the effrontery to call itself what it used to be: the Grand Old Party.

The UK heads towards an election that seems guaranteed to all but wipe out the Conservative Party that brought Britain the mirage of Brexit largely through the deception and vanity of Boris Johnson, aided by twerps such as Nigel Farage, himself offering new delusions these years later through his latest party, hilariously named Reform.

Back home, an Australian government seems stalled right at the time it needs to be dexterous to deal with a cost-of-living crisis, having barely recovered from its recent bout of self-imposed paralysis over non-citizen criminals having visas renewed.

Reform UK leader Nigel Farage.Credit: Bloomberg

Meanwhile, the federal opposition has set off on the populist tram, importing the essential themes of UK Brexit and US Trumpism by blaming the nation’s ills on immigration.

And now, abruptly, Peter Dutton and his followers, merrily ignoring the advice of the national science agency, the CSIRO, choose to treat voters like fools by precipitously conjuring a vision of nuclear power while offering no serious forecasts about cost, waste disposal, timeline and how it might mesh with other forms of energy.

Riding the streets, I reflect on the first significant lesson a competent motorcycle instructor offers to a new rider: “Look where you want to go.”

It sounds simple, but it is profound.

Motorcyclists owe their continued health to the advice.

It means that you should fix your gaze and purposefully tilt your head towards wherever it is you wish to go.

If you are to turn a corner, you must look towards the end of the curve and turn your head in that direction.

Magically, it seems, your bike follows without any further effort from the rider.

In fact, there is no sorcery about it.

Without consciously thinking about it, the rider makes small practised adjustments of hand and body that tends to steer the motorcycle in the direction he or she is looking.

It is almost entirely instinctive. Our bodies have been trained since childhood to respond to sight. We become, after a bit of experience, part of our conveyance. Our eyes take us and the bike where we want to go.

I’m far from the first person to find a metaphor for life in this.

Obversely, if the rider sees an obstacle and keeps looking at it, the motorcycle will head towards the danger. It’s got a name: target fixation.

There’s a tree, there’s a tree! Oh, dear.

Snow skiers, athletes, pilots, footballers lining up a goal, trying not to transfix their attention to the big sticks ... Anyone, really, needs to know the lesson.

I’m far from the first person to find a metaphor for life in this.

You need only see an individual, a business or, for that matter, a government or opposition heading for strife to know they’ve lost sight of where they really want to go.

If they haven’t already, it’s a sure bet they will soon start fixating on obstacles.

And then, ker-splat! Things will come apart.

Navigating life, of course, is rather more complicated than riding a motorcycle, even if the 1974 book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig has become one of the biggest selling philosophy texts in history.

Robert Pirsig maintaining his motorcycle in 1975.Credit: AP

Those who have read it – or parts of it, because it is hard going – will know it is a study of the meaning of “quality”.

To drastically oversimplify what “quality” might mean, it is worth considering Pirsig’s foundational discovery of a piece of Eastern mysticism that declares: “Thou art that, which asserts that everything you think you are (Subjective), and everything you think you perceive (Objective), are undivided. To fully realise this lack of division is to become enlightened.”

In short, all parts of your progress, if they are to add up to the concept or quality of enlightenment – or survival – must mesh. Elegantly.

Know precisely where you want to go. Turn your eyes to it as if your life depends on it. Hold your line.

Those who change direction abruptly, however, trying for a shortcut to destinations that are merely opportunistic, are very likely destined, eventually and inevitably, to fixate on the wrong target and come to grief.

The chancers won’t even need to go near a motorbike to learn the truth of it.

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