Crash and Learn
I don’t listen to any music on long runs, just the wind. It forces me to be with my thoughts, to tune in with my surroundings. It’s meditative for me but sometimes it’s hypnotizing.
On a solo run up the coast summer last year, somewhere in Pescadero off Highway 1, in the evening on a lone stretch of freshly paved road, I’d drifted off, fishtailed, skidded out, flipped over my handlebars, and crashed.
While I was fishtailing out I was gliding along the blacktop for what felt like an eternity, a moment that seemed to stretch out in time, looking at the sun, the sky, the ocean, feeling my pulse with enough time to think “is this it?” I tried to control my decent and almost felt I could ride it out before the back end kicked and flipped me over the front in an instant. I must’ve slowed myself down enough because amazingly I rolled only once and popped right back up to my feet.
I looked around in a daze to see Geronimo (my bike) on the ground and absolutely nobody else in sight. I ran over, picked it up, pushed it to the side of the road, checked it, checked myself, and stood there a while as only a single car drove past, only looking but not stopping.
Incredibly, aside from a bruised knee and light cosmetic damage to the bike, everything was alright. It started right back up and I kept going. Hadn’t told anybody till now aside from a handful of people about that. It shook me but I don’t think it really hit me at the time. Later I really thought about how close that was, how easily that could’ve just been that, and that have been the story of me. Maybe you’d have heard about it, maybe not, just one day radio silence and the world keep turning.
You can tell me I was lucky and I’d have to agree with you. I was fortunate nothing worse had happened, that I'd gone off a cliff, smashed into a rock, got ran over, lost a limb, landed on my head, broken my neck, any possible outcomes could’ve happened, but none of them did, I walked away.
Nearly everyone I talk to about motorcycle riding all have some story to tell about a crash they’d been in or know of where somebody got hurt or died, and that’s the reason why they don’t ride. It’s true, you can die out there some horrible death on the side of the road, and in so many people’s mind’s “why risk it?” But that’s not the way I see it. I look at it more like “no risk, no reward” because if I hadn’t have gone on that ride, or if everything just went perfectly smooth and I hadn’t have crashed, it wouldn’t granted me this other perspective. Maybe it was the “aha” moment I was needed to gain a new lease on life, telling me “hey, wake up, stupid! Pay attention!” It’s not a death wish I’m after, it’s a life embrace.
One part of me feels, “would it have really been such a tragedy if that was the way I went, doing something I love?” But that’s a naive and overly romanticized way to look at it, there’s no nobility in that. It’s not what I would’ve wanted to have happened. I haven’t done half the things I want to do, or been to all the places I want to be. I want to live to be a ripe old age, only I want to be able to say that I did things, that I accomplished something greater than selfish pursuit, that I went for it, and I lived to tell the tale.
The real tragedy to me is being too scared or too overwhelmed thinking about all the bad things that can happen that rob you from ever taking any chances, and you end up dying a slow death by analysis paralysis. Beyond that, for myself personally, instead of being frightened away, it’s shown me that I need to better embrace the time I’ve been given and stop pussyfooting around the things I ought to do and start getting them done sooner than later cause life’s too short and it can be over in a blink. I feel i’ve been given this unique point of view and ability to be able to communicate it in a way for people to understand, those like minded and not, and I realized I don’t want to go without sharing the things I’d learned along the way, without passing this “knowledge” on for others to make of it what they will, either as a cautionary tale or an illuminated pathway to alter states of being. For me that would be the real tragedy, the biggest waste would be if I never got the chance to get this down, get this out, let it be known and not die some fools selfish death.
There’s another way to look at it that I can’t really talk about without sounding too morose. Part of the reason I ride is to realize how close we are in proximity to death at all times, though we don’t know it or realize it. Everything around us is made for so many creature comforts, giving us the illusion of safety and security causing us to forget that we are finite beings with finite timelines, but in some moment, this will all be over, and over too fast. There are other ways, say through psychedelics do I keep my mind in the proverbial “death simulator” not as a fascination or fixation of death, but as an embrace of life, and a reminder that “momento mori, momento, vive” or “remember you will die, remember you must live.” Though these are things I know, I’m try to put them into practice, but up till then, I’d never had an actual “near death” experience. And for me, outside of just a thought experiment, it became all too real.
Instead of ignoring this great thing that had happened to me, brushing it off as a close call and just “one of those things,” I take it as a sign that I need to get my shit together and on track, least my life fall away from my grasp.
I look back on that now, some 7 months later, with a different lens, maybe a little more clearer about what’s been going on with me, and became the wake up call I needed. There’s a direction I’m headed, that i’ve always been headed, even through life’s detours, and it won’t be without its pitfalls, without it’s hazards. I’ll get lost along the way, have to back track, sometimes forget where I’m going, or why I’d started, for me it’s all just part of the process, on the way to some true calling. There will come a time where I can call this complete, and I’ll put even this down. From there I’ll do what I’ve always done, and move on to the next thing, what else is there?
