LIVE SLOW & GO FAST: Motorcycles and the Art of Slow Living

I try to not get offended when my posts about motorcycles don’t get as much attention as some of my other content. It makes sense - if you follow along for sustainability and slow living, travel tales, or even just pretty pictures, it can be hard to connect the dots from organic vegetables to incredibly loud machines ripping around. But for our household, motorcycles are absolutely a part of slow living, in a round-about way.

Let me start by being very clear here: my partner rides, and I am an eager passenger and photographer. One of these days, I’m going to learn to ride myself, but that day hasn’t come yet. So when I say “we” or “our,” I mean “his” and indulgently include myself because I’m a huge nerd who really loves motorbikes.

Motorcycle culture is a lot about going fast. And that’s fair; it’s really fun to have the wind in your face and feel the pavement rush under your feet. But there’s a lot of slow that has to happen before you can go fast. 

If you’re going to own a motorcycle, you need to be prepared to care for it, tune it, repair it almost constantly. Especially if you ride vintage bikes. My partner, Jonathan, has always had pretty much exclusively vintage vehicles, and most of them are older than us. We have two motorcycles in our shed - well, more like one and a half, but the half has most of the parts lying around somewhere, I’m told. They are eternal projects, and there’s always some little tweak that needs to be made or a full rebuild that is waiting on parts to complete. It is a constant state of delayed gratification - the essence of slow living - as he’s working towards quality rather than settling for convenience.

Of course there are times, especially on cold evenings when the one running bike is taking five, ten, fifteen kicks to start, when it would be so nice to have a newer model that you never have to negotiate with. But waiting, and not always getting what you want right away, is another part of a slower life. It drags you, kicking and screaming (at your motorcycle), into the present moment. All you can do is focus on the quality of movement that might, maybe, please-baby-please, get the engine started this time.

And once it is going, once the motor is warm and we’re rolling through the backroads, it is so absolutely and completely worth it. I love being a passenger because I cannot do anything but look around and think. No phone to scroll, rarely a camera to shoot with, and a constant awareness of the flow of the road and the land around us. 

Motorcycles let you get out there, WAY out there, and experience the whole journey. When you take a road trip by car, you’re in an insulated, isolated pod the whole time - a kind of public-private space where you are in control of everything from the temperature to the radio. On a motorcycle, all of those shielding comforts are stripped away and you take whatever the world throws at you. Icy rain or blasting sun, always with wind in your face whether mild or murderous.

If you’ve never ridden on a motorcycle, I would highly recommend it. But find yourself someone who takes it seriously and makes sure that you feel safe and comfortable. Communication is essential, both verbal and nonverbal which makes this an excellent exercise for a couple. The driver must be constantly aware of traffic and road conditions, even more than in a car because the consequences are so immediate. But even as a passenger, it requires physical presentness. You have to be open to sensing shifts in bodyweight that can make or break a sharp turn. You have to know how to manage your own center of gravity so that you’re not clonking helmets at every acceleration.

I will not pretend that I don’t think often about the environmental impacts. Although motorcycles are generally accepted to be more fuel efficient, are a lighter burden on the infrastructure, and have fewer parts to manufacture, their emissions are still comparable to automobiles. We choose vintage vehicles because that’s one less new production on demand, and we stand by that. But an unfortunate impact of riding vintage is that bikes produced in the 60s, 70s, or 80s don’t usually have the modern fixtures that curb some of the environmental consequences inherent in all fossil fuel burning engines. As I often say, it’s not about doing slow and sustainable perfectly, it’s about doing the best you can. And this is where we’ve landed.

There’s a long-standing connection between mindfulness and motorbikes. The seminal work on this is, of course, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which describes a father and son journeying across America with conversations on the essential nature of quality. But there are plenty of moto memoirs (linked below) that have the same focus on quality and presentness that you might find in a surf documentary. One of my favorite current projects is Meridian Child MC - a motorcycle club in Brooklyn that celebrates spirituality, consciousness, and female creators. They’re making the pitch that these brilliant social distancing machines might be the next frontier in wellness.

But whether the idea of roaring down a desert highway makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up or your stomach turn, I hope you can feel what I’m talking about when I say that motorcycles can be part of a slow life. We’re all using different languages to talk about the same thing.

READ MORE (contains affiliate links)

Meridian Child MC (Feature story on We Are Dore)

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Persig

Shop Class as Soul Craft by Matthew Crawford