Highway Travelers

People who ride motorcycles know that highways are the worst roads you could pick for a motorcycle trip. In fact, you rarely see many motorcyclists on the highway, and if you do, they’re probably there because they have no other choice. Likewise, if you’re on a road frequented by lots of motorcyclists, you can be sure it’s a back road with lots of turns. After all, motorcycle riders prefer routes that wind through nature.

People driving cars may never notice this, but on a motorcycle, without being sealed inside that little bubble of safety and convenience a car provides, which shelters you from nature and its wonders, you realize that long, straight highways can be incredibly dull, monotonous, and, ultimately, quite meaningless.

Highways are boring, crowded, dirty, noisy, far from nature, and full of rules. On top of all that, you generally have to pay extra tolls to drive on them. In return, you do arrive at your destination faster, and you feel safer due to the large number of fellow travelers headed in the same direction, even though there’s really no meaningful connection between you.

You know that if you break down, someone might help, and if you get bored or tired, you can always pull into a rest stop, almost all identical, and grab some fast food and coffee to keep you going.

On the other hand, if you choose winding back roads, especially on a motorcycle, boredom is never an issue. Riding a motorcycle is simply more dangerous, demanding greater awareness and alertness every moment.

Over time, though, this sharpens your focus and gives you genuine enjoyment, reminding you that you’re alive and filling you with a sense of gratitude. More often than not, these roads pass right through nature or bring you close to everyday life in the region you’re traveling through, you encounter local people, small towns, villages, valleys, forests, and bridges.

On a motorcycle, you’re more exposed to rain, wind, and sun, but it’s definitely worth it. When you insulate yourself completely from nature’s challenges, you also miss out on its most stunning rewards. Searching for beauty without embracing hardship is a quest doomed to fail. Being immersed in nature reminds you that you’re part of it, calling you back to your essence.

I think our life choices and lifestyles often parallel the comparison between cars/motorcycles and highways/back roads.

The beliefs, judgments, affiliations, and goals in life we’ve inherited -without much questioning- from our family, social circle, religion, and culture are akin to riding in a car, sealed off behind glass.

This need to protect our acquired identities and judgments, along with our endless quest for comfort and security, pushes us to choose highways, those roads that most of society also picks, deemed the safest and least risky. Accordingly, we reduce the journey itself (our life) to a mere means to an end, wanting the shortest route to get where we think we need to go.

But the reality is that beyond the illusion of comfort in your car lies a breathtaking world, and life is not just a route to a destination, life is the journey.

Highways, much like any approach that ignores the value of the journey itself and focuses solely on the end goal, are lifeless from the start. Whenever we treat the present moment merely as a means to something else, we lose sight of life’s real beauty; we slip into a kind of unconscious living in which each moment is reduced to chasing the next goal.

We never learn to savor what we have in the now, nor do we feel gratitude for it. Life becomes a meaningless race from one milestone to another.

In the modern world, living without awareness of the present is perhaps our biggest problem. Everything we do is overshadowed by thoughts of what comes next. You might notice this pattern in the simplest of daily routines: while getting ready for work in the morning, you’re already thinking about what you’ll do in the evening; once at work, your mind drifts to what you’ll eat for lunch; during lunch, your thoughts turn to your afternoon tasks, and so on, in an endless loop.

Only in rare, unexpected moments do we snap out of this trance, and for a split second we experience reality directly. But such moments are fleeting, and most of the time we remain ignorant of the present’s richness missing the true meaning of life.

The road -the moment you’re in right now- is life itself. Whatever your destination, you can only get there by giving proper value to the present moment. Life exists nowhere else but here and now. No matter how lengthy, winding, or difficult the path, it gains meaning when you traverse it with awareness, gratitude, and inner peace.

The journey that truly leads us to where we want to be is our internal journey. Every moment of our life can be a step on that path.

No matter where we’re going, the act of being alive and on the road is itself a beautiful experience. May we keep this awareness in every moment.