knowing the risk ...i still ride because?

......

Because I love it.
And if I die at least I die doing something I love.
And if you don't like that answer.
Don't ask me that question.

life itself is risky, so riding isnt much more of a chance, u can go at any time under the craziest circumstances, dude i went to school with died, he was crossing a swollen creek in his truck, he stopped to get out and look to see if his truck was going to get stuck, he slipped on the culvert and fell, not even 8 ft, hit his head and that was it, Dead so if ur goin ur goin period,

Look under my avatar. That little quote is there for a reason. I used to worry all the time about what might happen. When my father died from cancer at the age of 53, it forced me to spend a lot of late nights thinking about life. Two years later, my mother-in-law (who I actually got along with and dearly loved) was killed in a car accident while taking a friend to a doctors appointment. She was hit head on in her Jeep by an elderly man who fell asleep at the wheel. This incident cemented this thought in my mind. I have come to the conclusion for myself that a life lived in fear of what might happen is a life not lived.

When it's your time, it's your time. Plain and simple. Sure you can do things to reduce risk, and I know that helps, but.... Plenty of smokers live to be 95 and marathon runners die from heart attacks at 40. You just can't plan it.

well said testa my mom worked her whole life to retire and live in the mountains.just as the mountain home was being completed my mom was diagnosed with alzheimers. lived 3 more years and died.luckily my parents were adventurous.both have been to europe,taken motorcycle tours across the country.etc.when I see able bodied people just sitting around it kind of aggrevates me.to many lost opportunities.

What's that saying that mocks preserving health at all costs and suggests sliding into the grave with a worn out body screaming "What a Ride?!!"

Bill

because I can! :woohoo:

knowing the risk.

but that did not keep me from taking a trip across the country alone.

as i say: me myself and Irene lets have fun shit your going to die sooner or later.

worry what is that word as i look back on my life would i change anything hell no
i am who i am.

so lets ride

I feel more connected to the world around me,

I feel as though I'm flying without having to leave the ground (and no I don't mean driving insanely fast)

I feel trapped inside of any cage (car, truck, whatever) I drive or ride around in

I was born a few hundred years too late to have a horse as my primary means of transportation

The Home Owners Group won't let me have a horse in the neighborhood

And horses cost WAY more to keep.

Because living life without risk would be all too similar to not living at all... :dry:

“Life’s Clock”

“The clock of life is wound but once, and no man has the power to tell just when the hands will stop, at late or early hour. To lose ones wealth is sad indeed, to lose ones health is more, to lose ones soul is such a loss as no man can restore. The present only is our own, live, love, toil with a will, place no faith in tomorrow for the clock may then be still.”

Etta Johnson


Season of the Bike
by Dave Harlots (Found on the internet)

There is cold, and there is cold on a motorcycle. Cold on a motorcycle is like being beaten with cold hammers while being kicked with cold boots, a bone bruising cold. The wind's big hands squeeze the heat out of my body and whisk it away; caught in a cold October rain, the drops don't even feel like water. They feel like shards of bone fallen from the skies of Hell to pock my face. I expect to arrive with my cheeks and forehead streaked with blood, but that's just an illusion, just the misery of nerves not designed for highway speeds.

Despite this, it's hard to give up my motorcycle in the fall and I rush to get it on the road again in the spring; lapses of sanity like this are common among motorcyclists. When you let a motorcycle into your life you're changed forever. The letters "MC" are stamped on your driver's license right next to your sex and height as if "motorcycle" was just another of your physical characteristics, or maybe a mental condition.

But when warm weather finally does come around all those cold snaps and rainstorms are paid in full because a motorcycle summer is worth any price. A motorcycle is not just a two-wheeled car; the difference between driving a car and climbing onto a motorcycle is the difference between watching TV and actually living your life. We spend all our time sealed in boxes and cars are just the rolling boxes that shuffle us languidly from home-box to work-box to store-box and back, the whole time entombed in stale air, temperature regulated, sound insulated, and smelling of carpets.

On a motorcycle I know I'm alive. When I ride, even the familiar seems strange and glorious. The air has weight and substance as I push through it and its touch is as intimate as water to a swimmer. I feel the cool wells of air that pool under trees and the warm spokes of sunlight that fall through them. I can see everything in a sweeping 360 degrees, up, down and around, wider than PanaVision and higher than IMAX and unrestricted by ceiling or dashboard.

Sometimes I even hear music. It's like hearing phantom telephones in the shower or false doorbells when vacuuming; the pattern-loving brain, seeking signals in the noise, raises acoustic ghosts out of the wind's roar. But on a motorcycle I hear whole songs: rock 'n roll, dark orchestras, women's voices, all hidden in the air and released by speed.

At 30 miles an hour and up, smells become uncannily vivid. All the individual tree-smells and flower-smells and grass-smells flit by like chemical notes in a great plant symphony. Sometimes the smells evoke memories so strongly that it's as though the past hangs invisible in the air around me, wanting only the most casual of rumbling time machines to unlock it.

A ride on a summer afternoon can border on the rapturous. The sheer volume and variety of stimuli is like a bath for my nervous system, an electrical massage for my brain, a systems check for my soul. It tears smiles out of me: a minute ago I was dour, depressed, apathetic, numb, but now, on two wheels, big, ragged, windy smiles flap against the side of my face, billowing out of me like air from a decompressing plane. Transportation is only a secondary function. A motorcycle is a joy machine. It's a machine of wonders, a metal bird, a motorized prosthetic. It's light and dark and shiny and dirty and warm and cold lapping over each other; it's a conduit of grace, it's a catalyst for bonding the gritty and the holy.

I still think of myself as a motorcycle amateur, but by now I've had a handful of bikes over a half dozen years and slept under my share of bridges. I wouldn't trade one second of either the good times or the misery. Learning to ride was one of the best things I've done.

Cars lie to us and tell us we're safe, powerful, and in control. The air-conditioning fans murmur empty assurances and whisper, "Sleep, sleep." Motorcycles tell us a more useful truth: we are small and exposed, and probably moving too fast for our own good, but that's no reason not to enjoy every minute of the ride.

Didn't realize there was a choice! :laugh: