Heaven Spillth Over

This afternoon I got a fantastically relaxing hundred mile loop in even though at the outset of the day I didn’t think I’d get a chance to ride. Yet as luck would have it I was able to make a break for the canyons roughly around noon and even grab a quick bite at The Rockstore for lunch. Seldom have I been out on a more picturesque afternoon or witness such amazing natural beauty. All of which oddly got me thinking…

Faith. It’s such a loaded word in today’s world. It means so many different things to so many people and to be honest I rarely have any desire to engage in any debate surrounding it. Yet today I was so powerfully struck by how instrumental a word, ‘faith’ is when you’re riding a motorcycle.

For example you have to have faith in the road surface, faith in your tires, faith in your riding ability. You have to trust other peoples decisions, such as other riders and other drivers. You even need to have faith in the last mechanic who worked on your bike even though that wasn’t today, but perhaps a month or two ago. The concept of faith is so intrinsically tied to riding it ought to be printed on our M class licenses. There simply isn’t another word that so aptly captures the amount of trust we as riders have to place in the unknown in order to believe that we’ll make it through a corner.

Clearly I’m on a rather metaphysical roll this month, there’s no other logical explanation for why such a ‘deep’ thought would pop into my head while riding today. It’s neither a revolutionary concept nor a wickedly witty topic to write about, yet I was very aware of my faith in the bike today. It’s a strange thought I’m sure, but heading into a corner I realized that on some level I tell myself that the tires will hold because I have faith in a rather nebulous concept called the contact patch. It’s a concept that I can neither truly see nor feel. I simply believe it’s there. I believe it’s going to work. And corner after corner today I found myself wondering why sometimes it seems so hard to apply that same sort of logic in my faith towards the unknown to other non-riding topics. Why does my faith in the tires holding cease once I get off the bike and why can’t I transfer that learned response or perhaps even learned knowledge to subjects that don’t require a two-wheeled vehicle? It seems like something that shouldn’t be so hard.