I was recently asked "how can you work here and ride a motorcycle?" I suppose for that question to make sense, the context may be helpful. The person who asked was most familiar with the fact that I work with people who are recovering from a Traumatic Brain Injury. I also specialize in helping people cope with persistent pain. This, of course, is not the first time this question has come my way, in some fashion or another. And it left me thinking...
First, let me ask you, what do you love to do. Do you love your job? (Cheers! Me too. We are among the lucky minority it would seem.) Do you love caring for your children? Do you love to ride a bicycle? How about hiking? Do you like road trips? Driving to visit family? Skiing, snowboarding, skateboarding, surfing? What is it that you love to do? What makes your life interesting, meaningful, and fun?
Stop for a minute, and see if you can remember ever hearing about someone being injured doing these activities. Because I have. Almost everything I do in the course of the day before getting on and after getting off of my motorcycle, I have seen people endure pain or brain injury from. What sort of life would it be if we asked people to stop caring for their homes because they might get hurt? To stop spending time with their family? To stop working? That's preposterous, you might say. But in every activity there is risk. And if we let that risk stop us, we are living a life based in fear.
What if instead, we ask what makes you come alive? How will you know that you have lived a life worth living? What is your passion? How do you know your life is in balance? What if I asked you those questions, and helped you to build a life based on their answers? What if we respected other peoples answers to those questions, even as they are different from our own?
Like all of you, I am a complex person. I love my partner beyond belief. I love my kids in ways I cannot describe. I can spend an evening chatting with friends and have no idea where the hours went. I like to smile at babies in the grocery store, and pet other peoples dogs on hikes. I love to talk with people, to understand what is meaningful to them, and to help them figure out how to pursue their best life. I like going for walks and catching a surprise scent of roses, or discovering I am suddenly in the middle of a bog. I love to snuggle into the couch with soft blankets, and fall asleep while my family watches TV, my puppy's curled behind my knees. I love to camp, sitting around the campfire at night, drifting off to sleep unplugged from civilization, waking to the sun and the birds. And I love to ride motorcycles.
On this list, are motorcycles statistically more risky than the other activities? Sure. But the joy from each of those activities makes the others even more fulfilling. Each of the passions I describe above shine a light of joy on the others, making the other activities that much better. Take one out, the others shine less bright. Fear is also exponential. If we remove an activity we want to do because of fear, we will also have more fear in the other activities we love. Take out riding motorcycles, and suddenly we wonder if we are safe driving in a car to visit with friends. And we notice the number of hikers that have fallen from trails this year. And walking alone becomes riskier, because we may fall or be attacked. Airplanes? Statistically safer than driving, but hard to fathom. Oh, that brings us to driving; one of the most dangerous activities most of us do on a daily basis. Nixed from the list. Suddenly, the risks are in focus, and nothing is safe.
Our brain tends to follow a path. A path of self confidence, curiousity, and optimism or of fear, distrust, and pessimism. (or pick any path between these two extremes...) We practice this neural pathway over and over and over. And I choose to practice joy, optimism, freedom, and wonder. Which leads me to anser the question "how can you ride a motorcycle?" with "How can I not?"
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