Nineteen seventy-four, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (ZMM) landed on my lap. I was nineteen, just a crazy kid with a dream. Twenty-sixteen and I am in a hotel room in Winchester (long story of double bookings and administrative incompetence) and the book is back because I thought I might check it out again to see if it is how I remembered it. Looking back to then, I had no idea I would be here now, then again looking back at the weekend I had no idea I would be here either; three in the morning, unable to sleep. Which just goes to show, you can never really anticipate a life. One thing age has taught me is that ambition and progress through a life is just a journey and the journey doesn't ever promise a destination, so I guess ZMM has some resonance. Pirsig said, 'It's the sides of the mountain which sustain life, not the top.' I live on the side of a hill now but the nineteen year old me would never have seen where; neither would the nineteen year old have seen me planning Edinburgh, London, Florence, New York, Chicago, Oklahoma, Crete, Brisbane, Canberra and all else in-between for this year - though I am not forgetting Western Macedonia, or Corfu, where I took this picture (above) and where I was recently privileged to be an invited guest - and hope to return. But that's just as it is too. So, from my Winchester hotel room, I decided to eat then spread down the duvet and see where the motorcycle odyssey would take me, forty years after the first time round - though I hadn't expected to be here, reading ZMM again at three in the morning, while listening to William Byrd's Mass for Four Voices, 'It is a kind of nowhere, famous for nothing at all and has an appeal because of just that.'
Nineteen seventy-four, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (ZMM) landed on my lap. I was nineteen, just a crazy kid with a dream. Twenty-sixteen and I am in a hotel room in Winchester (long story of double bookings and administrative incompetence) and the book is back because I thought I might check it out again to see if it is how I remembered it. Looking back to then, I had no idea I would be here now, then again looking back at the weekend I had no idea I would be here either; three in the morning, unable to sleep. Which just goes to show, you can never really anticipate a life. One thing age has taught me is that ambition and progress through a life is just a journey and the journey doesn't ever promise a destination, so I guess ZMM has some resonance. Pirsig said, 'It's the sides of the mountain which sustain life, not the top.' I live on the side of a hill now but the nineteen year old me would never have seen where; neither would the nineteen year old have seen me planning Edinburgh, London, Florence, New York, Chicago, Oklahoma, Crete, Brisbane, Canberra and all else in-between for this year - though I am not forgetting Western Macedonia, or Corfu, where I took this picture (above) and where I was recently privileged to be an invited guest - and hope to return. But that's just as it is too. So, from my Winchester hotel room, I decided to eat then spread down the duvet and see where the motorcycle odyssey would take me, forty years after the first time round - though I hadn't expected to be here, reading ZMM again at three in the morning, while listening to William Byrd's Mass for Four Voices, 'It is a kind of nowhere, famous for nothing at all and has an appeal because of just that.'
