Why We Ride. Mark Barnes, PhD
line increases, it’s possible to get through there more and more smoothly, building speed and fine tuning the connection between Six and Seven.
The “trust me” line can be a metaphor for choice points in life, combining the values of two seemingly contradictory bits of wisdom: “look before you leap” and “he who hesitates is lost.” These appear to be competing notions about how to deal with challenging situations until you realize they work sequentially. Life never allows a full view of the future, yet success requires commitment. This makes it absolutely necessary (if you want to make progress) to absorb information all the time because you’ll have to go with what you know from past experience as you navigate the present on your way into the future. So, we must look carefully before each leap, accumulating knowledge that will help us hesitate less on subsequent efforts. These aspects of life can be captured and packaged neatly in the concept of the “trust me” line. Metaphors serve as efficient symbols to abbreviate lessons learned in one realm and allow us to apply those lessons more generally in other realms.
Here’s another example from the same riding school at the same track. A lengthy, nearly constant radius turn on the back half of Road America is called, aptly enough, the Carousel. When I was there some years ago, before recent improvements, this section was rather bumpy and provoked lots of jarring bike movement while heeled over, which was unsettling for both rider and machine. The common reaction to this is to reflexively tighten up everything from your hands’ grip on the bars to your butt’s grip on your underwear, none of which is helpful. What does work is to stay relaxed, allowing the bike to hunt its own way through the mess, trusting (there’s that word again) that your machinery was designed well enough (and, in the case of modern bikes, it was) to get you through unscathed, as long as you don’t panic and do something abrupt with the throttle or brakes.
Here, the life lesson is about the counterproductive nature of excessive control. Anxiety can propel us into the pursuit of a death grip on our circumstances or the people around us, which in turn usually drains or scares away our resources and does little, if anything, to change the situation for the better. Clenching up, micromanaging, or overreacting in life’s Carousels is a recipe for self-defeat. What we need is a calm, attentive approach that allows as many things as possible to work themselves out on their own, reserving interventions for those relatively few tactical points where they’ll be effective.
The author tipping it in at Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course—or was that Road America? Though rarely captured in photos, every racetrack has its own unique personality, joys, and challenges.
Metaphors aren’t just tricks for deliberately tucking away life lessons. They’re at the very foundation of our thinking about everything. In just the previous two sentences, check out the storage and building images. The concept of a container is one we use all the time, even though we’re often not referring to actual physical receptacles. The components and process of building a physical structure find their way into all sorts of ideas about other concrete items, organizations of people, and even how ideas “build on” other ideas. It’s pretty difficult to think or talk about most anything without employing a metaphor. Linguistics and cognitive psychology overlap in this area (catch the spatial metaphor?) and seek to understand the way virtually all thoughts are rooted (!) in our experiences in the physical world.
Now, obviously, motorcycling is not the only source for rich, meaningful, and valuable metaphors. But if motorcycling is something you’re interested in, it’s more likely to serve as just such a resource. Riding utilizes so many different faculties, provides so many different sensations, and requires so many different coordinated and complex operations that it may be nearly inexhaustible as a wellspring of metaphors (and their less poetic cousins, analogies). The only problem with riding metaphors is that only other motorcyclists who have engaged in the same activities and who’ve had similar experiences will be able to digest our wisdom in those terms. We might educate someone else about the “trust me” line as a conceptual analogy, and it could have some meaning to him or her. But it’s the experiential reference points that really make metaphors come alive and shed compelling new light on things.
Metaphors allow us to articulate and mentally manipulate what would otherwise be impossible to grasp. The more metaphors at your disposal, the more options—tools, if you will—you have for working with a novel situation. You apply metaphors, one by one, until you can choose which will fit best and provide clues and cues about what to do next. For instance, if the Carousel metaphor applies, I can try to relax and look for strategic moments to take action. But what if a different metaphor is more appropriate? What if, for example, it’s a situation more akin to emergency braking, wherein it’s of vital importance to act now with decisive force? Then a different constellation of variables and response patterns comes into play all at once, with the focus on quick, but still measured, application of intense effort.
How can I gain maximum “traction” in an argument? Where in my routine is the mixture of solitude and socializing too “rich” or too “lean”? What portion of my work needs a better “saddle” to support greater endurance? Which neighbors offer an “open road” for dialogue and which ones are more like “speed traps”? OK, these examples are getting silly. The point is that we almost always understand one thing in terms of another. The more “others” we have to get terms from, the better we’ll be able to understand the thing under examination, and the better we’ll be able to communicate that understanding to others. Trust me.
You Just Can’t Get There from Here
February 2002
In my work as a psychotherapist, I often witness people’s surprise as they grasp more fully something they already knew. Knowledge of the very same fact can come in layers and have a deeper impact each time. Usually it’s the social context that facilitates an openness to additional meaning, especially if it reduces our self-consciousness.
You probably know the old joke. A man stops to ask directions (which is funny already!), and, after several false starts, the person trying to explain the directions gives up, befuddled by the complexity of the numerous turns required, and utters the above proclamation.
Sometimes, however, a straight line isn’t the shortest distance between two points. As counterintuitive as it sounds, there are situations wherein the direct pursuit of a goal precludes the achievement of one’s stated objective. It’s that way with speed.
I had just returned from a day at the Kevin Schwantz Suzuki School at Road Atlanta. Although I’d heard it many times before—and believed it, and preached it—the exhortations of chief instructor Lance Holst sunk in a little deeper for me than they ever had before: “Don’t worry about going fast. Speed will come as a by-product of concentration and confidence.”
Maybe it was because former MCN editor Lee Parks had kept me awake well into the wee hours of the morning, catching me up on recent events in his life. (He’d stuck around, having won the WERA National Lightweight Endurance Championship there a couple days prior.) So I was really too tired the next day to push myself into the red zone of excitement/terror out on the track.
Maybe it was because I was a little older than I was when I last rode around a racetrack. I’m now less able to maintain the illusion of invincibility and less worried about being labeled “the slow guy”—not because I’ve advanced beyond that position, but rather because I’ve grown to accept the possibility of occupying that position without so much shameful self-consciousness. I was there to have fun and see what I could see, not impress the staff or my classmates.
Maybe it was because I’d been at and on the track at Road Atlanta enough times in the past
that I always knew what was around the next corner. And I’d spent plenty of time on Suzuki SV650s, so the SV650S they provided for me was instantly familiar and a wonderfully user-friendly bike, anyway.
Maybe it was because—more than at any other track day I’ve attended (I’ve done eight, several with schools)—the staff seemed genuinely interested in helping students regardless of their ability level. So all that politically correct talk about enjoying yourself,