I got in last night about seven. It was a 533 mile ride from Arlington back home. Of course I made the same ride in reverse going up, but my thoughts were focused on the events to come. On the ride back I had time to reflect on the ride itself.
I left Arlington by the George Washington Parkway, then took I-66 west all the way to I-81 in the Shenandoah valley. After that, I rode the Shenandoah valley and then the New River valley to the city of Bristol, which bestrides the border between Virginia and Tennessee. From there I continued west and then south to Johnson City, south to the high wall and crossed into North Carolina there.
The great rivers I crossed yesterday were the Shenandoah, the Roanoke, the New River, and the French Broad. Lesser rivers include the Watauga and the Tuckasegee.
While I was stopped at the Tennessee Welcome Center, I met a young man who had just purchased his first motorcycle, a Kawasaki Ninja. He was learning to ride and came to me to seek advice. He had bought the bike exactly one month ago, having talked his young wife into accepting the idea of him riding in spite of her concerns.
I advised him as I did with my own son: to be sure to take the safety course, which would help him develop crucial skills like emergency braking without laying the bike down, and defensive driving. Also, I suggested, he might want to avoid any roads with nicknames like "Snake" or "Dragon" for at least six months to give himself time to build those skills and turn them into internal habits.
To assure me that he was practicing diligently, he turned his bike on so I could see his odometer. It read 495. "I just bought this bike a month ago," he told me.
I told him, "I'm riding further than that today." That got his attention, so we discussed the ride and then I reaffirmed the importance of him seeking the safety training. I hope that the conversation will encourage him to seek it out.
Motorcycles are wonderful, but if any young people are reading this and thinking about doing it as well, please do get the training first, and then do the practice necessary to internalize it into habit. As Aristotle says, developing virtue only begins with understanding what the right thing to do is in a given circumstance. Virtue isn't knowledge, he says, but habit: you have the virtue only when you have practiced doing the right thing to the point that you can do it without having to think about it again.
It might seem odd to describe skill at motorcycle riding as a sort of virtue, because the Christian inheritance tinges 'virtue' with a moral quality that is absent in the case of motorcycle riding. That isn't true in the Greek, though: the Greek word is arete, which means "excellence" and 'the ability to excel' at any practical thing. The moral virtues are like the practical ones, and the analysis holds for all of them. You practice moderation by moderating yourself until it is habitual to do so; you practice horsemanship by riding horses. Here as there, the skill of learning and then developing a virtue is a thing you can learn, and then you can apply that skill across your life. It will help you in everything that you do.
5 comments:
I advised him as I did with my own son: to be sure to take the safety course, which would help him develop crucial skills like emergency braking without laying the bike down, and defensive driving.
Excellent advice. I knew too many hometown peers who suffered either death or accident from motorcycle riding.
When Sib had a motorcycle, Sib took the safety course, practiced on quiet roads and back streets, then took a second course geared toward big-city riding (it was offered where Sib lived). Sib managed to avoid accidents and incidents until the day the motorcycle went to a new, appreciative home. Sib-in-law prefers four wheels to two, and car-seats don't fit well on certain built-for-speed motorcycles.
LittleRed1
You did well, hopefully your advice was well taken.
Motorcycling is two separate skills, really.
The first is the performance envelope, of bike and rider.
The second, and arguably more important, is situational awareness, and the corresponding judgement. Pilots have a saying something like this- "A superior pilot uses superior judgement to stay out of situations requiring superior skill"
David Hough wrote a very useful book called "Proficient Motorcycling". Primarily about safe riding techniques.
And sometimes nothing helps but luck or Divine Intervention.
My wife saved me once-quite literally-on a deserted highway, We waited at a junction and watched a lone box van approaching. As it became clear it was turning I started to pull out, and Angel,on another bike,screamed. I stopped, knowing nothing but the unmistakable urgency of her call.
Truck turned, and a little car screamed by where I would have been.
It was following the van so close it was completely hidden-from my angle.
A few feet away, Angel had a vector on it. I class this in the Divine Intervention category. And formed a new rule- never haste where I cannot see.
Yes, part of it is skill habituated into virtue; and part of it is Luck, which is surely divine in character.
Glad you had a good ride, Grim. Our years in Johnson City were good years, and I remember well crossing Sam's Gap twice a week to teach in Hendersonville.
Concur with virtue-as-habit.
I tell [any of] my cello students [who will listen] that while the mind may understand concepts in a flash, the body learns like a three-year-old, with lots of slow distractions and entertainingly false starts.
So the trick is to learn how to use your quick mind, I tell them, to aid your slow, wandering body in its directed learning, which is often a counterintuitive set of tactics, running at right angles to the mind's preference for sharp clean conceptual edges.
Instead of clean edges, biological squishiness (joints don't just hinge, they squish) and network fuzziness (too many neurological inputs to track, so they must be allowed to self-organize) come into play. It is the mind's job to see how to do this (in a flash), and then to let it play out over time.
Also, lately I've been noodling on a musical analogy:
Practice (alone) is to rehearsal (together) as Reason (alone) is to Argument (together).
As in, the only point of argument is to hammer out a mutually satisfactory JOINT understanding, otherwise why bother?
Reason it out if you want to understand for yourself, but save argument for collaborative, targeted efforts (otherwise it's a fight, not an argument, and should be treated accordingly).
It strikes me that this might be a useful distinction, in a subversive sense.
Do you know of any similar such distinctions in the philosophical literature?
-Piercello
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