The machine itself receives some of the same feelings. With over 27,000 on it it's getting to be something of a high-miler, and old-timer, although there are plenty of older ones running. But over the...
Another one is cleaning up tool that have been used and not put away and are cluttering up the place. This is a good one because one of the first warning signs of impatience is frustration at not bein...
The title of this Chautauqua is Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, not Zen and the Art of Mountain Climbing, and there are no motorcycles on the tops of mountains, and in my opinion very littl...
When cleaning I do it the way people go to church—not so much to discover anything new, although I'm alert for new things, but mainly to reacquaint myself with the familiar. It's nice to go over famil...
You can reduce your anxiety somewhat by facing the fact that there isn't a mechanic alive who doesn't louse up a job once in a while. The main difference between you and the commercial mechanics is th...
The TV scientist who mutters sadly, The experiment is a failure; we have failed to achieve what we had hoped for, is suffering mainly from a bad script writer. An experiment is never a failure solely...
People entered the park and became polite and cozy and fakey to each other because the atmosphere of the park made them that way. In the entire time he had lived within a hundred miles of it he had vi...
I talked yesterday about caring, I care about these moldy old riding gloves. I smile at them flying through the breeze beside me because they have been there for so many years and are so old and so ti...
If you can’t define something you have no formal rational way of knowing that it exists. Neither can you really tell anyone else what it is. There is, in fact, no formal difference between inability t...
Bill arrives with a grin about something. Sure, he's got some jets for my machine and knows right were they are. I'll have to wait a second though. He's got to close a deal out in back on some Harley...
Chris asks, What are you going to stick to?Mah guns, boy, mah guns, I tell him. That’s the Code of the West.
The range of human knowledge today is so great that we're all specialists and the distance between specializations has become so great that anyone who seeks to wander freely between them almost has to...
I want to talk about another kind of high country now in the world of thought, which in some ways, for me at least, seems to parallel or produce feelings similar to this, and call it the high country...
What he’s looking for, what he wants, is all around him, but he doesn’t want that because it is all around him. Every step’s an effort, both physically and spiritually, because he imagines his goal to...
Motorcycle maintenance gets frustrating. Angering. Infuriating. That's what makes it interesting.
Correct spelling, correct punctuation, correct grammar. Hundreds of rules for itsy-bitsy people. No one could remember all that stuff and concentrate on what he was trying to write about. It was all t...
On any mechanical repair job ego comes in for rough treatment. You're always being fooled, you're always making mistakes, and a mechanic who has a big ego to defend is at a terrific disadvantage. If y...
He comments on how amazing it is that everything in the universe can be described by the twenty-six written characters with which they have been working.
That’s extremely important to understand. He had given up.Because he’d given up, the surface of life was comfortable for him. He worked reasonably hard, was easy to get along with and, except for an o...
The student’s biggest problem was a slave mentality which had been built into him by years of carrot-and- whip grading, a mule mentality which said, If you don’t whip me, I won’t work. He didn’t get w...