Tao and the Art of Motorcycle Riding

“At birth, a person is flexible and flowing. At death a person becomes rigid and blocked. Consider the lives of plants and trees; during their time of greatest growth, they are relatively tender and pliant. But when they are full grown or begin to die, they become tough and brittle. The tree which has grown up and become rigid is cut into lumber. Whatever is flexible and flowing will tend to grow. Whatever is rigid and blocked will atrophy and die.”

The Tao of Leadership, by John Heider

Over a month back, when I decided to pack my bags and embark on this journey of over 3000 km riding solo on a bike to the Himalayas, I was responding to a call from the mountains who have been beckoning for long. Or was it my unconscious response to this subtle realisation that I was slowly getting stiff and rigid & needed time to pause and reflect ….?

Whatever be the reasons, this couldn’t have been better timed. What better way to squeeze in life’s long cherished dream of exploring the Himalayas just after having stepped out of a comfortable job and before entering the big wide world of opportunities to make it out on my own?

Besides so much that happened during this eventful sojourn of almost a month, one belief that got reinforced big time was that when the intent is right, only the best will come to you! How else do you explain I finding a puncture repair shop in the middle of complete wilderness when I needed help? Or I retrieving a wallet lost some 100 km away, because it had to land in the hands of someone who felt it very natural to take the trouble to find contact details from inside it and call my wife to tell her that she had a very careless husband? Or my meeting with absolute strangers who almost literally ‘move mountains’ for me? Lest the last part be construed as an extreme exaggeration, let me share that I accidentally came across a fellow soldier from the Border Roads Organisation who actually made a very special effort to get a pass cleared of snow, which might have taken days otherwise, forcing me to take a detour of a few hundred kilometres through the hot plains for me to reach my next port of call. It saddens me to also mention that while I was allegedly the first rider on that newly opened road, on the same day a minivan on that very road was swept away by an avalanche, killing all its five less fortunate occupants!

These 3000 km of riding on the mountain roads and about 100 km of walking in the hills has brought home many a lessons, the prime ones being about positivity, of belief in inherent goodness in mankind, of the world conspiring to make it happen for you when you so dearly want something to happen, and so on. I also return loaded with a strong feeling of utter gratitude for being exceptionally blessed and protected….!

I don’t think I would have needed to experience all this at a better juncture in my life than when I embark on this new phase in my life of launching Enstasy Consulting, to share with those who I have worked with in the past and those who wish to work with me in the future what this journey and many more have taught me in life…..

• Looking forward to some exciting times ahead…..