Accepting The End Of The Road

One of the strange things for me regarding the concept of not riding a motorcycle again is the “I do care/I don’t care” dichotomy of it all. I was never really a motorcycle guy, as such, but rather a guy who happened to ride a motorcycle. I never really adhered to the so-called motorcycle or biker culture, and I never gave much thought to riding beyond having it as an available means of transportation. I would often see groups of people riding on the weekends while wearing their motorcycle garb and I would wonder where they could possibly be going on their bikes. That type of lifestyle just wasn’t me. I used my bike for work and errands. That’s not to say that I didn’t enjoy riding; I did. But riding a motorcycle was not a very big part of my life at all. Consequently, any issue for me now regarding the fact that I will probably never ride again involves the idea that I can’t do something because life has deemed it so.

It’s sort of like the issue of voting. Here in the U.S. we don’t often have a large voter turnout for the elections. We do not have 100% of eligible people registered to vote, and we do not have 100% of registered voters actually making the effort to vote in each election. Statistically, the percentages can get fairly low for some elections. With this in mind, think of what would happen if the voting process were terminated in the U.S. and politicians were placed in office by some other method. Imagine what would happen if issues were not settled through a democratic process. My guess is that there would be a great deal of protests and the American people would demand an immediate reversal of policy. Why? Undoubtedly it comes down to our love of Constitutional rights and our demand for personal freedoms. I think that a lot of people don’t necessarily want to take the time out of any given day to actually go out and vote, but they do want the right to choose whether or not to vote.

This, I believe, is my issue with not riding. It’s not that I have some pressing desire to ride. It’s just that a moratorium on motorcycle riding, albeit self-imposed, means that I’m not allowed to ride. A strong sense of honor toward my family will always prohibit me from allowing myself to get on another motorcycle. Still, I don’t really need to ride; I just don’t like feeling as though something in my life is restricted to that extent. It almost feels like teenage rebellion, only without the heartache of acne on a first date. I guess that I’ll get over it within time.