The Sense of Presence – Why I Ride

“…the sense of presence is overwhelming.” My Kawasaki W800.

I ride a motorbike. It is a newish thing; at the time of writing it is right on five years. I am 50. Of course, I suffered the anticipated ‘mid-life crisis’ jokes, but riding is one of several roads all leading towards a central point in my life: presence.

“You see things…on a motorcycle in a way that is completely different from any other,” wrote Robert Pirsig in his acclaimed Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

“In a car you’re always in a compartment, and because you’re used to it, you don’t realize that through that car window everything you see is just more TV. You’re a passive observer and it is all moving by you boringly in a frame. On a cycle the frame is gone. You’re in the scene, not just watching it anymore, and the sense of presence is overwhelming.”

Pirsig got there by page 2. It’s important.

A friend of mine who also rides, calls Pirsig’s compartment a ‘full metal jacket’. I’ve also heard it referred to as a ‘cage’. While my friend’s consideration is one of safety, the sentiment—to both—is the same: you are enclosed, you are removed.

Like most kids growing up in 1970s suburban Australia, I learnt to ride a push bike. The bike was freedom. I remember one friend telling me that his father once took away his bike for a week as a punishment. My friend pleaded with his father to be smacked instead. “Just hit me Dad!” he begged. Anything but the bike.

Bikes were freedom; much more than transportation to and from school or to a friend’s place. Bikes are where we learnt that the journey is more important than the destination. Where we were going mattered little; the fun was in the ride. It was riding with our mates, exploring the streets, surrounding suburbs and bush tracks until it was dark; being independent, making decisions, enjoying being outside, falling off, losing skin, and getting up again.

These were pre-helmet days too. The wind was in our hair, the sting in our eyes; jumping off gutters, and sliding around in the dirt; ruining sneakers, tearing school shirts. The ‘sense of presence’ was ingrained in us. We could, as Pirsig continues, “put your foot down and touch it anytime”. And touch it we did.

And then, at 16, we learnt to drive.

It’s a flick of a switch, how quickly it happens. What was once “never removed from immediate consciousness”—Pirsig again—becomes, like that full metal jacket, very removed. High school gets busy, extra-curricular activities take you into the evenings and weekends, study becomes a reality. Suddenly the time to be free disappears. Everything is urgent; time management becomes a thing—so much so that we all got given daily planners in Year 7.

School is no longer up the road but requires a bus and then a train and about an hour-and-a-half to get to. You have to be places at a certain time and then be back in time for something else. Your friends all go to different high schools; your new friends live scattered all over Sydney’s north shore.

Life became new and priorities changed. High school, music, the burgeoning age of the personal computer; girls, sport, university, career, marriage, family, responsibility, stress. It happened quickly. But surely it was only yesterday that I was tearing down the fire trail on my Redline Mk III. Next to me was a mate on his Malvern Star Super Max, another on a Madison; someone had a Mongoose, another a Bennett and my brother on a matching Redline. But suddenly the road I once put my foot down on and touched anytime had become office carpet or a lawn that needed mowing.

Motorcycle camping. Bike, swag, tent and a beach somewhere.

By 45, I needed to get on a motorbike. I’d kept cycling, getting right into road cycling for a time in my late 20s. It had petered out by my 40s, but road cycling was a different thing to the BMX of my youth. Cycling now was lycra, it was organised, it was all about average speeds, calories burned, and kilometres per week. For many it was about carbon fibre, but I maintained my 70s roots and took the ‘steel is real’ path, building up a beautiful Italian steel Gios. Days out alone were great, but something was missing.

Surfing had been my big thing for many years. Road cycling had actually replaced it as I found I wasn’t surfing as much as I once had. Something had been missing there too. 

What was missing was presence, which sounds weird coming from a surfer. There are few pursuits that bring a person closer to their environment than surfing. But I was inches away from my truth and never knew it.

Surfing had led me to Surf Lifesaving which, in turn, led me back to surfing. But a second stint at lifesaving got me into bodysurfing. Suddenly I was in the water, not on it. Bodysurfing was a very different feeling. I didn’t feel removed from the wave but part of it, in it. My body was feeling all the energy in the wave and the ocean around me. My body moved to the rhythm of that wave; to draw its energy to propel me forward. The sense of presence was head to toe. And I felt more vulnerable as I had nothing to hold onto to keep me buoyant. All I had was my own fitness and ocean skills.

Surfing was now bodysurfing. There was no board between me and the water; it was just me and the water; me in the water. And with bodysurfing came ocean swimming: 1500m every morning at Manly.

Years of surfing had kept me on the water. Bodysurfing and swimming put me in it. The difference is mesmerising, the aquatic life astounding. Instead of being near the ocean, I felt intricately part of the ecosystem. So close that I regularly bump into fish, and they me. Schools of fish, rays, sharks, turtles—they’re all there yet seemingly unperturbed by the ocean swimmers within reach. Presence.

Roger Deakin, was clearly channeling Pirsig when he wrote in Waterlog—his acclaimed book that ushered in the concept of ‘wild swimming’—“You see and experience things when you’re swimming in a way that is completely different from any other. You are in nature, part and parcel of it, in a far more complete and intense way than on dry land, and your sense of the present is overwhelming.”

Norwegian writer and explorer, Erling Kagge, says he prefers to be barefoot, “To feel the wood floor, the cement, carpets, grass, sand, muck and tarmac. Or moss, pine needles and rocks.” He knows what it is like to put his foot down and touch it anytime. He knows, as he says, that “Naked feet are more vulnerable”. 

And so too with a motorcycle. It is largely a reclamation of the feeling of riding as a boy. But it brings with it the vulnerability that is missing from much of modern life. Riding and ocean swimming have brought back the excitement, the adventure, the independence, the danger. And it is deeper now than ever before. No longer am I a mere observer. The frame has gone; the full metal jacket has become leather—or nothing. The cage door is open. And the sense of presence is overwhelming.