Going Nowhere

Feeling lost isn't just "phase" you go through in your adolescence or in your twenties; it kicks down the door without warning, often in moments when so much is going on. I often think that it's a clever way for your brain to send you a signal. For the purpose of slowing down, and recentring yourself.

As it happens, motorcycling offers the perfect antidote. Not because it gives you a purpose, but because it doesn't.

When we're kiddos, everything is neatly packaged and presented to us without choice. Values, culture, religion... default character settings, basically. Because of this, it's quite easy to belong, and to feel like you have a sense of purpose. Then, on some random day, the training wheels come off when someone asks:

What are you going to do with your life?

Right. Let me just quickly reverse-engineer the meaning of existence before lunch.

But you all know the story. Do you pursue your studies or not. Do you keep your parents' politics or toss 'em. Try on a few religions, or retire God early. Marry. Don't marry. Corporate job. Nomad. Motorcycle content creator (how did I get here?). Every path you choose has its fan club, and its pitfalls.

So you wait. You wait for something, for someone. That thing that will suddenly instill your life with meaning, so you don't have to feel lost in the dense forest of your own life.

But what if embracing the uneasy feeling of being lost is the thing that, ironically, helps you better find your way?

The Bike, as a Compass

A motorcycle is a celebration of pointlessness.

Yes, it has its uses (commuting, travel, etc.). But the very spirit of riding is suspicious of being "useful." Some of my favourite rides (and yours, most likely) start with a "Dunno, let's see where the road takes me."

Too bad modern day culture spits on anything that isn't "goal-oriented." Can't monetize your hobby? Useless. Can't optimize your workout? Disorganized. Can't justify an activity on Excel? Then it's a guilty pleasure that comes after everything else.

This philosophy lacks balance. It's all too literal, and frankly, quite boring. The magic of motorcycles, and any other "useless" hobbies, is that they reward you when you stop trying to justify them.

And when you let it happen, the world simplifies. Your attention narrows to a few basic prompts. Some analyze traffic, others are given space wander. While part of your mind is tasked with not dying, the rest of it is oddly free. To imagine. To question... To play.

On a long, meandering ride with no destination, you write the soliloquy that holds up a mirror to your life and reflects it back. It could sound terrifying, but when it happens to me, I feel relieved. The feeling of being lost starts to fade, and even if I'm literally lost, the free space is bountiful in returning meaning to my life.

The bike is a compass that points inward.

The Nausea of Uncertainty

There are parts in your life when you can be "in between" identities. Not fully committed to this path or the other, and not entirely indifferent either. You experiment, with no script to follow, and intense anxiety makes its stunning debut.

Getting lost is admitting that it's alright to feel uncertain. Many people would shudder at the idea and skip the uneasiness altogether. They grab the first available identity off the rack and play a role that doesn't represent who they are. They wear the mask, sometimes for an entire lifetime, and even if their life "appears" to have meaning or merit to others (family, friends, etc.), it never does to the most important person: themselves.

You always pay the price when you take shortcuts like this. The nausea of uncertainty can never be banished, it can only be repressed or embraced.

Motorcycles, as it happens, are a great way to teach people how to inhabit that in-between without drowning in it. When you ride to explore, nothing catastrophic happens. And when it's too much, you consult a map, or a sign; heck, you improvise a new route. Eventually, you rejoin a road you recognize.

The important part is that you're the one calling the shots. And that sense of mechanical control over something offers the perfect backdrop to examine the uncertain paths of your life that keep calling to you.

I kind of make the motorcycle sound like a mystical calling, as if it were some crystal ball with all the answers. The kind of thing that'll whisper the name of your soulmate into your helmet if you ride fast enough. Sorry to disappoint, but I don't think anything can really offer this type of enlightenment.

What motorcycles really offer is a lab. A moving metaphor you can sit on.

Time Waits for No One

People can imagine themselves as moving through time. But what if we're the ones that are stationary, and time is the thing moving through us? The seasons come and go, our body ages, something is happening to us regardless of our preference or mindfulness.

We can stand there waiting for meaning to appear, by coincidence or luck. Or we can just swing a leg over the nearest bike. One thing is for sure: at least it'll take you somewhere.

It might not be the path you thought of, or one that is particularly useful to you right now, but it's still a part of you, a part of life that you have yet to explore. In that moving solitude, somewhere between "I have no idea what I’m doing" and "This feels right," you might start to notice the faint outline of a life that actually fits who you are.

Not the life you were handed. Not the one you were threatened or guilted into. The one you gradually piece together out of real curiosity, real joy, real risk.

Sometimes you have to get lost on a motorcycle to realize that being lost was never the problem. The problem was standing still.

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A Note From the Author

This piece comes from a place of inner conflict for me. I've wrestled a lot with the expectation to do something useful and often rebelled because the pressure felt insurmountable. I studied philosophy, became a musician, a motorcyclist and a chess player. Basically, I pursued every "useless" hobby in the book out of spite, but that was also just as costly as "fitting in." I treated the hobbies themselves as an antidote, but failed to realize that the constant antagonistic pursuit of them was blinding me from their actual benefits. I was using the hobbies as a competitive drive and became obsessed with "becoming skillful," which, as it happens, is just the same pragmatic mindset one might have for "useful pursuits." I am still learning to detach the goal-oriented approach from these hobbies, and the more I do, the more I realize that the dead-space of uselessness is actually more useful than any accolade I could receive. Because it provides joy, it provides a stillness that quiets hardship, a peace that keeps giving. I hope motorcycling does this for you as well, dear reader.

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