What follows is based on actual occurrences. Although much has been changed for rhetorical purposes, it must be regarded in its essence as fact. However, it should in no way be associated with that great body of factual information relating to orthodox Zen Buddhist practice. It’s not very factual on motorcycles either.*
Learning a new physical activity for me is usually a theoretical exercise long before I actually try putting it into practice. I don’t suppose this is much different for most people – adults at least – and especially as compared to children who can very often jump into a new activity or sport and learn simply by doing. Beginners-mind has it’s place, but not at 100 km/hr. Or on two wheels.
Seven years ago I decided it was now-or-never if I was ever going to learn to ride a motorcycle. So I bought as many books as I could to learn how to be as competent and safe as possible. Having made it somehow to my mid-fifties, I wasn’t about to simply jump on.
I tried to learn as much as I could from the experts, took two learn-to-ride classes, watched DVDs, and learned the theory of how to be proficient – and, ideally, not kill myself. (In comparison, though, meditation must either be much more complicated and/or dangerous because I’m currently taking my fourth learn-to course for that…)
I’ve been asked a number of times why I ride. One reason I often give is because it forces me to be aware every second – not only of what I’m doing but also what the other traffic is or isn’t doing, and of the conditions around me. In other words, concentration is pretty important – and losing it even briefly is discouraged by everyone that I’ve studied.
So where am I going with this?
It sometime takes me a while to put the theory into practice – to work up the gumption. After several years, once I’d progressed from parking lots and streets in new commercial developments with no traffic, it was time to head out on the highway.
The thing with learning it by the book is it still takes practice to develop into second nature. What I was doing was okay but I was over-thinking every move. It wasn’t natural or very smooth. When I finally navigated a long, sweeping, right-hand curve in the road simply by doing it and not thinking about it, I had a breakthrough in understanding not only what the process is, but a direct indication of how it works.
As Sharon describes it in Real Happiness, “Our habitual tendency is either to grab on to a thought and perhaps build a complicated scenario around it, or to push it away and struggle against it.” Making that curve in the highway wasn’t hard once I didn’t complicate more than it really was, or struggle.
I can still see that moment in my mind’s eye because of the awareness it brought. The road behind me didn’t matter anymore and the view off in the distance wasn’t yet here.
That is still one of the best experiences I’ve ever had of “being in the moment”. Hardly a “peak experience”, but one that allowed me to find the next moment, and the next. And not crash.
Robert Pirsig, in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, describes “gumption” as when someone connects with Quality. He equates gumption with enthusiasm, from the Greek enthousiasmos and which “means literally “filled with theos,” or God, or Quality.”
…The gumption-filling process occurs when one is quiet long enough to see and hear and feel the universe, not just one’s own stale opinions of it.
…If you’re going to repair a motorcycle, an adequate supply of gumption is the first and most important tool.
…Gumption is the psychic gasoline that keeps the whole thing going.*
Coming back to my reliance on reading manuals, something else Pirsig said closes the circle for me in terms of translating theory into practice:
… it occurred to me that there is no manual that deals with the real business of motorcycle maintenance, the most important aspect of all.*
In other words, going past the theory into the understanding that only concentration and practice brings.
“See? . . . See?” and I think she does. I hope later she will see and feel a thing about these prairies I have given up talking to others about; a thing that exists here because everything else does not and can be noticed because other things are absent.*
*Robert Pirsig: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
With mettā,
Rod.