Do Not Stay at Home
Paolo Volpara © OMM 1999
As Rudyard Kipling wrote time ago “All things considered, there are only two kinds of men in the world: those that stay at home and those that do not”
Good bikers do not stay home and continuously discover new friends, new roads, new skills.
Motorcycling is much more than using a machine and all competent riders are the moving evidence of this point. Learning on bike never ends: situations always change and observation, planning and execution change with them.
However, the real learning is not on the skills but on the spirit.
Trained bikers are all the ambassadors of an honest, committed and serious way to approach the sport of motorcycling, constantly raising the standard of biking and calling to this challenging art new people.
More important a trained biker is what can be called a “self conscious biker”.
A biker who takes any opportunity to analyze himself for improvement, who is not afraid of criticism, who is confident of his own skills but… always tries to get better.
This attitude, combining Confidence and Humility, is a lesson for life and it can be effectively applied at work, in the family, in all relationship.
“I am the Best… but I still have to learn” is the final message of training: above any evaluation, behind any score we may achieve there is always a new challenge, something new to discover and to practice.
Only when the learning curve flattens, when the confidence becomes presumptuous attitude, when our souls and minds are closed to new learning, only then we stop biking and we become sad stereotypes dressed in leather.
We must keep the Spirit of learning alive, keep the humility of listening open, and keep the desire of improving potent.
Carol Celik once wrote to OMM: “I do not define myself as belonging to one group, I am not a Harley, Yamaha, BMW rider, I am just a Biker”.
A biker with self-consciousness, a professional biker is the only companion we all want on our rides.
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