Wow, it's hot today: 32 Celsius (90F). I've been sitting around steaming and staring blankly into space. Spent loads of time in a car traveling because me and my family went to a park miles outside of of London - went half way back to Canterbury today, everything got very familiar the further out of London we went. I Spent a happy hour or two harassing fallow deer in a park somewhere near Sevenoaks and then went home.
It was weird being in a car again. I've spent the last year walking everywhere and now cars seem a bit restrictive. Robert Pirsig wrote about how a motorbike is better for traveling long distances than a car because on a motorbike you are in the scenery, whereas when in a car you are watching it through a window, reducing nature to just more television. I've never entirely dug that, but after the last few days I'm starting to understand that view a bit better. All the way to our destination today I was craning my head around like a schizophrenic cat, trying to see though a fleeting gap in a hedge or back at some glimpsed vista, wanting to be able to see all around me rather than just what could be seen between the struts and frames.
I think that to properly dig the world around you, being on a motorbike isn't enough. You need to be able to sit and watch, pause and see everything in a different way, see it in love, see it out of love, get drunk in it, throw up on it, do a handstand in it if you want; basically, live in it. You can't live everywhere though, which is sometimes a problem, and sometimes not. A lot of the world is butt-ugly so I think it's probably better to see the beautiful places in detail rather than everything, good and bad, in one shape only.
oh dear, I sound like a hippy.
-Ben
