A life principle, feels Buddhist somehow, cherish your time. A different thing entire from wanting an easy time. The crucial character of time cherished, a sense being engaged. Sometimes demanding, sometimes like riding buoyant on a wave, but always that engagement.

This imperative a sufficient justification for being on a motorcycle. More profound than mere practical advantages, like getting where you want to go, great as these are. On the motorcycle, you’re engaged.

Engaged with what? Anything, as long as it’s outside the stale tired confines of your own mind. Off a motorcycle, the imaginative world of a book, or painting, or music, or scientific theorem. Or another person. Or a sport. On a motorcycle, the raw outside dangerous universe. Riding, the world is real and physical and there. Wind and rain, G forces, ever present yet never the same. Demanding your attention, absorbing your mind. Thereby freeing you.

End of a motorcycle journey, it’s never, thank goodness that’s over, it’s, gee how interesting.

This sixty minutes on the motorcycle today, rain spattering the visor, chill gradually invading the body, cramped visibility. Backing off when challenged by overassertive cars, conditions not good enough to dish out lessons. All an enrichment, something you’re pleased you did, even if you weren’t specifically thinking that’s how it would be at journey’s start. Alive time.

Relishing alive time carrying a corollary. Namely, the menace of dead time. Dead time also having a crucial character, lassitude, signaling disengagement. Time best ended. Which when ended carries no refreshment. Like inebriation. Or being in a car stuck in traffic. Or being in a club.

Little dead episodes, you have to watch them, they add up. Too many of them and a year goes by, what happened during the year, well, not much, and it wasn’t very pleasant. Then another one. Then a lifespan.

The solution, do things that enrich your life, like motorcycling. And don’t do things which don’t.

The motorcycle manifesto.