Kelly’s Korner: Uncertain About Your Riding Motivation? That Can Be a Good Thing
Last Updated: December 4th, 2020
Last month’s column asked readers to ponder what motivates you to ride. I received some empowering and sobering responses to that post, and I’ve since been ruminating even more on motorcycling motivation and how mine has been non-existent this year – a travesty, I know, especially considering how riding got me through last fall’s layoff. However, instead of continuing to flagellate myself, I have decided to see this lapse in riding interest as an opportunity re-explore my values and doublecheck whether riding still aligns with who I am and where I want to go. Maybe that will ring true for you, too.
The dwindled interest did not occur on purpose. These past few months have been fraught with the craziness and excitement of starting a new job, moving out of a longtime house and into a new city, buying another house and settling in; and in between, I realized my health was taking a dive. That snuck up on me and I reached the point where I felt too tired and spacey even to drive. And if I was losing confidence in my capacity behind the wheel, no way was I getting on a bike.
Sometimes when I don’t feel a hundred percent, I go a little black-and-white (working on that) and wonder whether my pursuits really are mine. You know, whether I like what I say I like and why I think I like the pursuit in question. I was going there this year about motorycling, feeling guilty and neglectful, putting a label on myself as a “bad” rider, starting to ask myself why I keep my bikes. Judge if you like but it’s hard to see reality well through brain fog and constant fatigue.
The truth is I do love riding. And I think the natural course of pursuing something meaningful probably entails, for many people, a waxing and waning process. Rather than berating ourselves, as I was doing, for spending less or no time on the bike, let’s use that interval to ask ourselves what we want from the motorcycling lifestyle, if we want the motorcycling lifestyle. Riders strike me as among the more self-aware people on the planet and I think many understand that questioning ourselves can, in fact, strengthen what we believe about ourselves. Speaking for myself, I want to once again feel motivated to ride and enjoy the adventure and freedom that come from that experience. To do that, I need to return to good health, so there’s my action plan.
Tell me how you deal with those times of riding-motivation uncertainty.
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Sometimes other things in life get in the way and I can’t ride for awhile. I fly airplanes fore a living which takes me out of town a lot . I try to keep busy with physical fitness activities, such as, martial arts, swimming jogging, etc. Sometimes I do have uncertainty about riding. Like its to dangerous and risky. But the second I get back on a bike I always love it!