Eric Adriaans

Quality

November 28th, 2022
Introduction

Quality Undefined

Definitions

The Metaphysics of Quality

Zensylvania’s Provisional Definition

See Also

References & Notes

External Links
If your compass does not point towards Quality, where does it point?
Introduction

I wanted to start this essay with a reasonably brief and straight-forward definition of the word “quality”. As it turns out, I couldn’t find a practical definition that I was satisfied with. It may be a peculiar trait of mine that I prefer a word’s definition not to contain words or concepts that merely point straight back to the place I began. Unfortunately, when I began searching for a definition of quality, that is what I discovered – a semantic Ouroboros that kept circling back-upon and consuming itself .

For example, Merriam-Webster’s definition says that quality is “a degree of excellence”. Follow-through on this information and you find that excellence is “an excellent or valuable quality” and that “excellent is very good of its kind : eminently good.“. Of course something that is “eminently good” means that it is observably good. Next we find that good is something that is “of a favourable character” or “conforming to a standard” among other things. Finally, something that is of a favourable character is something we favour or prefer while a standard is of course “something set up and established by authority as a rule for the measure of quantity, weight, extent, value, or quality“.

It’s like that with all of the definitions that I’ve looked at so far – a somewhat fuzzy realm of subjective preferability and objective standardization.

Image Courtesy: https://mythology.net/others/concepts/ouroboros/

The extraordinary fuzziness and variability of what may be contained within the term “quality” is somewhat surprising but hardly a new matter. Every one of us has some degree of self-assuredness that we know what is or is not of good quality. So certain are we of this that Pirsig quoted Plato as a kind of heading to ZAMM with, “And what is good, Phaedrus, And what is not good – Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?” We’ve always known what is or is not good….we have our own fuzzy logic system to determine what meets our individual and ever-changing mix of subjective preferences and objective standards.

Regular visitors to Zensylvania will probably be familiar with Zensyalvania’s ongoing preoccupation with Robert Pirsig’s books, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values and Lila: An Inquiry into Morals. I have readily used Pirsig’s books as touchstones within several investigations and inquiries. These two books are categorized by some people as works of philosophical fiction. This categorization describes a situation where a story is used as the setting, context or framing for some particular philosophical material to be conveyed.

While it is tempting to spend time quibbling over the extent to which the categorization of any book or work as philosophical fiction is meaningful, and indeed the extent to which the term reasonably applies to Pirsig’s books, I’m going to avoid doing that for now. It may be something to examine at some later time. Instead, I’m going to go along with this particular application of the analytical knife because it is clear that, even if they aren’t entirely fiction, Pirsig’s books are intended to communicate some particular philosophical content and that they are fictionalized (I actually prefer the term, mythologized) versions of Pirsig’s life.

The philosophical content that the books convey has come to be known as the Metaphysics of Quality. And that is where we’re going to start in this essay.

‘Start” may not be exactly the correct term since that really began in the Zensylvania podcast Episode 15, wherein I spent some time in review of a book titled On Quality: An Inquiry into Excellence. This is a posthumously published collection of Pirsig’s comments and insights into the Metaphysics of Quality which was released in March of 2022. For this essay, I want to begin by returning to some of my comments from that Zensylvania episode. If you’ve previously reviewed that episode, this may be slightly repetitive, I hope to mitigate any sense of redundancy by expanding on the initial reactions I had.

All of this will be in an effort to pin down a few basic questions when it comes to the Metaphysics of Quality.

Quality Undefined: Moving Towards an Initial Definition

Throughout ZAMM and much of Lila, Pirsig avoided providing a definition of “Quality”. On page 97 of On Quality, there is an excerpt from his 1974 lecture at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design where he said that, “One of the advantages of keeping Quality undefined – which is central to [Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance]…as long as you keep it undefined, then it becomes an instrument of change, and you can grow, because the things that you find Quality in are going to change as you grow.“

Despite his early motivation to avoid providing a definition of Quality, Pirsig eventually used the term as a direct or indirect referent to a variety of other concepts which I am listing here:
- God
- the phoneme “rta” from the Proto-Indo-European language
- the essence of experience
- selection
- meaning
- dharma
- the pure thing (Hindu traditions); the pure non-thing (Buddhist traditions)
- “what holds together”
- righteousness; rightness
- the stable condition which gives man perfect satisfaction
- duty toward self
- virtue of the ancient Greeks
- the Cosmic order of things
- spirituality
- Metaphysics of Quality is Metaphysics of Spirituality
- the Tao
This is probably an incomplete list as Pirsig admitted to a preparedness to talk about Quality for hours on end without establishing a firm meaning. Initially, I’d like to focus on the third item in this list, “the essence of experience” as it introduces two underlying connections that should be examined.

In David Grainger‘s 2006 book, John Dewey, Robert Pirsig and the Art of Living: Revisioning Aesthetic Education, Grainger suggests that Pirsig’s idea of Quality is equivalent to Dewey’s idea of “Experience“. For those who may be interested to verify for themselves whether Grainger’s comparison is correct, he seems to rely upon Dewey’s Art as Experience and Experience and Education. You can be sure that these are on my acquisition list for 2024.

In the meantime, here are a few ideas from Dewey. Ordinary experience has no structure. It is a continuous stream. The subject (i.e. person) goes through the experience of living but does not experience everything in a way that composes an experience. Meanwhile an aesthetic experience is a kind of event which stands out from the ordinary or general experience. While I don’t pretend to any kind of authority to correct or alter Dewey’s terminology…it occurs to me that Dewey was establishing that Aesthetic Experience is at least partially comprised of definable events while Ordinary Experience is not. Experiences are structured situations over time – however fuzzy may be the definition of the experience’s actual beginning or end.

Dewey’s ideas do seem to echo Pirsig’s notions of Static and Dynamic Quality where Static Quality seems to share some attributes with Dewey’s Aesthetic Experience and Dynamic Quality with Ordinary Experience.

In FSC Northrop’s The Meeting of East and West (that is the book which Pirsig credits with closing his youthful period of drifting and lending direction to his life, there is a passage about “undifferentiated aesthetic continuum” and “experience”.

Later in this essay I will look at A.N. Whitehead’s Process and Reality but for now let me suggest that if there are parallels between Pirsig’s “Quality” and Dewey’s “Experience”, these may also be aligned with Whitehead’s “Process”: “The process is nothing else than the experiencing subject itself. In this explanation, it is presumed that an experiencing subject is an occasion of sensitive reaction to an actual world.”

Granger references’ Heisenberg’s Principle of Indeterminacy and says something that links these things together, “all existences, material and ideational, are best viewed as events rather than substances.“

And this leads me to the observation that

Quality is an event.

What is Quality?: Toward a Second Definition

In order that we may get at what Pirsig may have been trying to convey in the Metaphysics of Quality, it seems essential to get at the individual terms in the phrase. I’m going to set aside the term metaphysics for now except to accept a kind of common-knowledge definition of metaphysics as the part(s) of philosophy which deal(s) with the fundamental nature of reality and existence and, by extension, those parts of reality and existence which don’t (at least superficially) appear to have a source or cause in physical, objective sources.

Provisionally I am interpreting the phrase “Metaphysics of Quality” such that the word “of” is a function word indicating origin or derivation. So the phrase, “metaphysics of quality” means: an explanation of the fundamental nature of reality and existence where quality is the original source or cause. Another way to phrase it might be that reality and existence is derived from a primordial Quality.

And now we have the question…what is “Quality“?

Since the Metphysics of Quality is Pirsig’s notion, it seems only fair to begin with explanations that he’s provided. But we will get to some other explanations that I’ve found interesting during that time I’ve been examining the idea….and, of course, also to some of my own observations.

In On Quality, there is an excerpt from a letter dated September 11, 1994 and it includes this brief section:

“Quality can be equated with God, but I don’t like to do so, “God” to most people is a set of static intellectual and social patterns. Only true religious mystics can correctly equate God with Dynamic Quality. In the West, particularly around universities, these people are quite rare. The others, who go around saying, “God wants this,” or “God will answer your prayers,” are, according to the Metaphysics of Quality, engaging in a minor form of evil. Such statements are a lower form of evolution, intellectual patterns, attempting to contain a higher one….” (pg. 81)

This seems to be a good place to start because it establishes and gives shape to a few specific traits that Pirsig posited about Quality. So I want to parse the various phrases here in an attempt to determine what he may have intended.

First he says that “Quality can be equated with God“. I want to take notice that Pirsig did not say “Quality is God“, only that “Quality can be equated with God”. Philosophy can readily be an exercise in splitting and re-splitting of conceptual hairs, but this is one that does seem to need to be split. The difference between the phrase “Quality is God” and “Quality can be equated with God” is meaningful because the concept of equivalence (as represented by the words “equated with“) is not that of sameness (As represented by the word “is“).

By saying “Quality can be equated with God“, Pirsig seems to be suggesting a comparison of two separate concepts based upon a function. The specific function being described is, as established in the brief definition above, that of an original source or cause.

In other words, Pirsig’s Quality functions in his metaphysical system as a monism in a similar fashion to how God functions as a monism in some other metaphysical systems.

The balance of Pirsig’s passage is an attempt to steer examination of “Quality” away from theology. Undoubtedly, there are a number of very good reasons to do that. But it is also very difficult to establish an existential origin story without having to engage the argument for a primordial entity or agent of creation. A deity. When I read Pirsig, I have the sense that he tries to do so.

Of course trying to posit an existential origin story without a deity causes some people a great deal of difficulty. And that maybe one of the reasons that Pirsig phrased things the way that he did. The Metaphysics of Quality is an explanation of existence and reality where the concept of “Quality” functions as the concept of “God” in separate and distinct existential origin stories. Discussion of “Quality” is not, therefore, a theological discussion on the nature of a deity.

Quality vs quality vs qualities: Towards a Third Definition

Now that we’ve established, to a limited extent, what Robert Pirsig had in mind in his Metaphysics of Quality, I’d like to get back to some more practical and familiar conceptions of quality.

In the day to day usage of the term, we may be quite comfortable with referring to any given thing or experience as being of high or low quality or perhaps alternately good quality or poor quality. In other words, we assign a value to a thing or experience based upon some collection of subjective (personally perceived) traits and objective (empirically measurable) characteristics.

If we are, for example, visiting an auto-parts store to purchase a bolt to replace one that has broken during a repair on our motorcycle, we might say that a particular store-clerk’s dismissive attitude or lack of knowledge regarding engine bolts was a low quality service; similarly we might feel that the purchased bolt was of excellent quality as its metallurgy and machining met the specifications for the bolt’s purpose. Our subjective and objective criteria either were or were not met.

Often these criteria are considered to be “qualities” of the item or experience. A store clerk’s attentiveness is one quality while their product knowledge is another quality. Similarly, the bolt’s metallurgy and machining are sometimes referred-to as qualities.

This use of the term quality in day-to-day use is actually problematic as these ought more accurately to be referred to as: properties, factors, components, elements, constituents, items (a variety of other terms might easily be added) of the artifact’s or experience’s overall quality.

In this way, quality (and even qualities) are a set of subjective and objective measurements of an artifact’s or experience’s ability to fulfill its defined or expected purpose.

It would be correct, albeit slightly absurd, to argue that a banana makes a very poor quality engine bolt nor that an engine bolt is a low quality snack. Clearly, banana’s are not intended to be engine bolts and engine bolts are not machined for human nutrition. This means that defined purpose is an important and meaningful consideration. Defined purpose is another way to say that quality is relational and that the quality of an artifact or experience is normally assessed in context of an expected or defined purpose.

Fuzzy Standards: Synthesis of the Definitions

This is where the title of this essay considers what I’m calling “fuzzy standards”. While I am not completely aware whether this term that I’ve used is completely novel, I will say that it derives from my Incomplete Exploration(s) of Fuzzy Logic and concepts therein.

Within Fuzzy Logic, there are so-called Fuzzy Sets which comprise a predetermined set of conditions to inform an input-output decision making model. In this situation, the Fuzzy Set attempts to allow for a nearly infinite range of possibilities between 0 and 1 (the ultimately reductive binary either/or). In a binary-digital world, engine oil might be called either “hot” (denoted by 1) or “cold” (denoted by 0). Clearly this is not correct as temperature is almost infinitely variable and could be assigned a nearly infinite range of temperatures based on the extent to which more (or less) heat is present.

I mention this as an indication that “Fuzzy Standards” begins to consider the matter of the phrase ” the extent to which” in setting of standards within a Dynamic Quality world.

I’ve borrowed Pirsig’s term Dynamic Quality and the fact that a perpetually changing world fundamentally establishes that any standard (eg. a specific oil temperature, a particular metallurgical composition of a bolt, a depth of knowledge of a clerk) must necessarily be fuzzy (situationally-defined) and relational.

The Metaphysics of Quality and The Philosophy of Organism

In Episode 15, I commented that I felt this passage maintains Pirsig’s inquiries in alignment with humanist enlightenment ideas and also some ideas that Alfred North Whitehead expressed in Process and Reality.

Alfred North Whitehead

In that book, Whitehead provided what he called the “Philosophy of Organism“. In my opinion, Pirsig’s philosophy is well-aligned with many of Whitehead’s ideas.

Whitehead opened Process and Reality with the declaration that “This course of lectures is designed as an essay in Speculative Philosophy.” and then goes on to define and defend speculative philosophy. Well Pirsig’s Metaphysics of Quality is also an exercise in Speculative Philosophy. Here is Whitehead’s definition “Speculative Philosophy:

Speculative Philosophy is the endeavour to form a coherent, logical, necessary system of general ideas in terms of which every element of our experience can be interpreted.

Since Whitehead was a thorough-going philosopher, he proceeded to provide definitions for most of the terms used in the definition. I’m not going to chase that all down at present. I’m including it here in our consideration of Quality to help set the setting for Pirsig’s definitions (since there have been many) of Quality as a concept within a Speculative Philosophy system as presented by Whitehead.

“I ride, therefore I am.”: Rene Descartes would have written it, if only he’d had the opportunity; Photo Courtesy Pinterest

In Whitehead’s preface to Process and Reality, he explained his approach in contrast to others when he wrote that “The positive doctrine of these lectures is concerned with the becoming, the being, and the relatedness of ‘actual entities’. An ‘actual entity’ is a res vera in the Cartesian sense of that term; it is a Cartesian ‘substance’, and not an Aristotelian ‘primary substance’. But Descartes retained in his metaphysical doctrine the Aristotelian dominance of the category of ‘quality’ over that of ‘relatedness’. In these lectures ‘relatedness’ is dominant over ‘quality’.”

Whitehead goes on to give a brief summary of relatedness but again I’m going to defer examination of this to focus on the similarity in approach between Pirsig and Whitehead, specifically that the positioning of quality within a metaphysical system is a meaningful part of that system.

Returning to the earlier passage by Robert Pirsig that Quality can be equated to God, I am grateful that Wendy Pirsig and the editors of the book didn’t shy away from including this passage as it does positively establish the kind of metaphysical positioning of Quality that Pirsig reached.

All of that is to say that Pirsig’s capital-Q “Quality” term may be readily separated from common day-to-day usage of the term since the underlying position of the term is different than a subject-object-relational metaphysics as found in Rene Descarte’s outlook.

I say separate – but that may not be the right term as Pirsig did further divide Quality into “Dynamic Quality” and “Static Quality”.

A Provisional Definition of Quality

While it is certainly tempting to continue running down various rabbit-holes… I think we’ve actually reached a good point to finalize and summarize a provisional definition of Quality.

Quality is an event which a subjective experiencer (an actual entity) relates to within an actual (objectively real) world; in static form, quality is the aggregation (or fuzzy set) of subjective and objective measurements of an artifact’s or experience’s ability to fulfill its defined or expected purpose(s) and is consistent with a delimited Aesthetic Experience within an ongoing Undifferentiated Aesthetic Continuum. In dynamic form, Quality is that which mediates relations between an undifferentiated aesthetic continuum and actual entities. Quality is an idea and term which allows every element of our experience to be interpreted. It functions as a monism and may be best described via the metaphor of a field.

(Editorial Note: the above definition is a second revision circa February 2024).

I hope this jumble of metaphysical jargon is as clear to you as it is me. I will admit that I find it extremely satisfying that this definition has not yet resulted in an Ouroboros–like circle where I end up staying that quality is quality – and we all know what that is.

Strangely, I also find that this definition has both practical daily applications which may be just as useful as any metaphysical implications that there may be.

See Also
References & Notes
- Item
External Links
1. https://www.etymonline.com/word/cycle?ref=etymonline_crossreference#etymonline_v_521
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Learning

August 5th, 2021

February 22, 2026

A few months after my forty-fourth birthday, I purchased a battered and abused 1982 Yamaha XJ 550 Maxim. While I had previously (and subsequently) owned and enjoyed many different cars and trucks, the Maxim was my first motorcycle. So far, it has been my only motorcycle. In part, I acquired the Maxim to fulfill a long-deferred curiosity and ambition. That being, of course, to learn how to ride one of these hazardous machines. I was certainly aware that buying a motorcycle and learning how to ride it might be a significant event or feature of my life. After all, that’s why I was doing it. However, I really had no idea how much of a fundamental change that the experience would have on my relationship to learning and living.

At the motorcycle garage, and sometime dealer, where I found the bike I would eventually buy, there was a small selection of used bikes to choose from. I had originally visited the shop with the intention to look-over a couple of 1980’s era Honda Magna’s that had been advertised for sale. Alongside the Magna’s however, I found a yellow 750 c.c. Maxim as well as the smaller 550. In fact, the five-fifty was tucked away amid the many larger bikes and might easily have been overlooked and forgotten. I could probably have purchased any of the larger displacement bikes without much regret. To be honest, the bigger motorcycles even appealed to an immature and egotistical impulse to buy a much more powerful machine than I needed or was prepared-for. But something about the five-fifty attracted me. Sitting on the bike felt comfortable and right. The Maxim’s teardrop-shaped fuel tank and side covers were black with purple flames stretching, in a classic hotrod style, toward the back of the bike. Despite this styling cliché, the flames didn’t seem to take themselves too seriously. I mean really, purple? And the whole paintjob was what may be generously called “tired”. The flames had gone past cliché to quaint. At some point in the decades before I’d owned it, someone had also removed the original curvy chrome handle-bars that the bike had been sold with to a straight, black motocross-style bar. I could hardly have known what a good idea that had been when I bought the bike, but that handlebar set-up gave the bike its own personality and handling that helped to build my confidence as a rider. The bike’s original dual chrome exhaust pipes had also been replaced by a matte black four-into-one design. Inside the cement cinder block walls of the garage, revved to a few thousand r.p.m., the little four-cylinder sounded racy and entertaining. Inviting rather than intimidating. The gauges and instruments didn’t seem to be original to the bike either. Here was a motorcycle that was clearly past prime condition and into a second or third shot at life.

With thirty year-old patina. The purple flames that didn’t take themselves too seriously. The genuine exhaust note. Dropping eight hundred dollars in the middle of February in 2014 meant that the little four-cylinder motorcycle, and all of the possibilities it presented, was mine to be had. I wouldn’t be able to ride it for several months, but I was excited and satisfied to obtain what seemed to be an apt avatar and metaphor of my self.

More recently, as my fiftieth birthday came and went, I approached another long-deferred curiosity and ambition: beginning to learn the martial art called Tai Chi. It might be forgiven if someone were to argue that learning to practice Tai Chi seems rather less exhilarating and significantly less dangerous than learning to ride a motorcycle. After all, isn’t one of the archetypal images of Tai Chi that of grey-haired elders moving slowly, and probably in unison, in a park-like setting? But at fifty I had – and continue to have – expectations that learning Tai Chi would be every bit as enriching an experience as learning to ride a motorcycle had been.

It isn’t the riding of a motorcycle or the performance of a particular Tai Chi movement that we should be concerned with. Those experiences are moments in time that can be enjoyed and remembered, for sure. But what we are more concerned with is our relationship to learning how to do these things in the first place. The creation of the state of mind where it is possible to learn a new skill or set of knowledge is itself an achievement that is worthy of consideration.

Aesthetically, learning to ride a motorcycle and learning Tai Chi may seem to be opposing activities appealing to very different types of people. Riding a motorcycle can be brazenly loud and smelly, not to mention physically demanding. Riding a motorcycle carries the ever-present threat of injury or death. Riding a motorcycle is potentially the fastest and riskiest iteration of yourself in motion that you can experience. Stop paying attention at the wrong moment and you could face the worst (or even the last) day of your life.

Meanwhile practicing Tai Chi seems to be the epitome of the quiet, the calm and the physically un-intimidating. The greatest danger faced by the person engaged in Tai Chi seems to be that of peacefulness and serenity. But there is a dark side. Tai Chi is potentially the slowest and most connected iteration of yourself in motion that you can experience. Stop paying attention at the wrong moment and you could be faced by your own lack of physical coordination, balance and self-understanding.

But these two very different activities appeal to a similar need. That is the need to be a genuine learner or novice with something. Despite the external and overt aesthetic differences, these two activities have some very considerable similarities when it comes to learning and re-setting my understanding of myself.

When I decided that I would finally learn to ride a motorcycle, I was already firmly established in middle age. While the objective to ride had been something I’d carried all the way back from my early-twenties, finally doing it was not some kind of stereo-typical mid-life crisis grab at youth. Nor was it a form of fantasy life-style wish-fulfillment. I had no interest in becoming a wild-life biker, speed-track rider or whatever may come to mind when some middle-aged man buys a new toy. In fact, the idea of riding a motorcycle had always been both attractive and intimidating for me. It had mostly seemed like something that other people did but that I probably wouldn’t. It was the kind of thing that would inspire the thought “Wouldn’t it be great to experience riding a motorcycle”. But that thought was usually followed by ” But that isn’t the kind of thing I’ll really actually do”.

At that time, my family and I were having a tough year. Several things had happened that seemed to be out of our control. Health issues. Career issues. Life issues. Things that I had taken for granted or that I felt that I had achieved – or that I felt were still achievable, had rather suddenly become uncertain. The details of those times are almost wholly irrelevant to the point that I want to make. Most people experience a version of the kind of crisis I’m talking about at some point in their lives. For some people the crisis they experience, the difficulties they encounter may be so enormous and shattering, that anything less dramatic might seem embarrassingly small in comparison. Setting comparisons aside, however, sooner or later life knocks us down.

Suddenly I was in shadows of fear, self-doubt and uncertainty. For me it was a time when when my confidence in myself and in the fundamental rightness of the world had been seriously dinged-up. There were parts of me that were emptied out as they hadn’t been in decades. I didn’t consciously know it at the time, but I needed to take something on that would help me re-build my integrated self from the ground up.

Perhaps through the force of an instinct that I wasn’t aware of, I did it. I tackled something that was almost wholly outside of my character and skill-set. I put myself in the position of a beginner and a learner. I can’t emphasize enough how important this point is. In Zen philosophy, there is a well-known expectation that a person should maintain a “beginner’s mind”. In Zen, there is the word “shoshin” which has this sense that a beginner approaches something without pre-conceptions. Shoshin indicates that the experience, the thing that the person has begun, is fresh, new and not already known. A person who is a beginner is a whole learner. Relative to the thing that is to be learned, the beginner has no status and no standing. Everything is still un-acquired.

But so much of the life, career and society I grew-up with and into had negated the value of a beginner’s mind. Building a career, a family, a home and a sense of self was, for me, the opposite of maintaining a beginner mindset. Building a career or a sense of self is exactly that – building. It’s an additive process. Experience upon experience. Year upon year. Becoming a specialist or an expert in a career of any kind is a process of amassing knowledge, skills, competence over time. You don’t “get ahead” in a career by being a beginner. And being ahead is, by practical application, no longer being a beginner. On the corporate ladder, beginners are at the bottom rung, not at the top.

Similarly having a home with a set of family traditions and memories means adding, day-to-day, night-to-night, year-over-year, occasion after occasion to everything that came before. Birthdays. Holidays. Weekdays. Weekends. Meals. All of the activities that a family encounters are built through a combination of familiarity, repetition and in some cases, improvement. I had spent decades becoming the person I was. I wanted to continue to be better – but my conceptions of better were additive rather than reductive. I wasn’t un-happy with myself. But I was facing situations where I really didn’t know how to continue building in the face of the experiences and difficulties I had recently had. Motorcycling came along as an opportunity to place value in being a ground-up beginner.

With motorcycling, I started with a two-hour long try-it-out course at Fanshawe College in London, Ontario. It was the kind of course for people who’ve never been on, or probably near, a motorcycle. People who’d ridden a dirt-bike as a kid, or maybe had a motorbike earlier in life didn’t take this kind of course. This was for genuine, full-on beginners. On the day that I took the course, there were about a dozen students of various ages, but we were all equal in our skill. Essentially none. We needed to show up with a helmet, gloves and other basic gear to allow basic, safety-oriented exposure to motorbikes. Beyond that, the instructors assumed we knew nothing about how to approach and operate a motorcycle. But there was no condescension by the instructors as regards our role as beginners nor was there any apparent assumptions about us as people. Unlike someone who may be starting a new career from scratch or re-building their home finances after a major set-back, the beginner motorcyclist isn’t necessarily faced with anxieties over those really big components of life.

Ironically, this absence of real or perceived social and economic consequences is exactly what makes this kind of activity valuable to developing and maintaining a beginner’s mind.

In that all-too-brief course, we learned where the various controls on the bike were and how they functioned. We learned how to operate the clutch and how to operate the gear selector. We learned about the brakes and where we should be looking while riding. And we started to learn how to put all of these things together while riding. By the end of two hours, the instructors let us putt around in first-gear on the college’s Honda Titan 150 bikes. Riding at less than ten kilometers per hour was one of the most eye-opening experiences of my adult life.

And for me, it was enough to lead to buying that 550 Maxim and to signing up for the weekend-long learner course that was designed to help turn beginners like me into competent (if not proficient) street-legal riders. I am not a risk-taking thrill-seeker at heart and was very confident that there was no point in jumping on any motorcycle without expert guidance to help keep my middle-aged skin and bones intact. By the end of the second training course, I had done something that I hadn’t done since I was a kid – I learned the basics of a completely new physical skill.

But I had done another thing that was probably more important to me. I had re-set my ability to be a full and true beginner. I sold the motorcycle after a couple of years. I’d ridden around my county frequently enough to feel confident on the bike but without ever feeling like an expert. I was able to ride. I could now look at a motorcycle and say, “wouldn’t it be nice to experience riding a motorbike” and the second thought was “I know what that’s like” rather than “but that’s not something I’d ever actually do.” Learning to ride was an exciting, dangerous and extremely enriching personal experience. After a couple of seasons exploring Elgin County’s farm-and-Carolinian-forest-lined roads, I sold the bike. At the time, I had other priorities and felt that my curiosity about motorcycles had been satisfied and the ambition fulfilled. I got out without sustaining any injuries and that seemed to be enough at the time.

Being a beginner can be exhilarating but the best thing about being a beginner is that it lets you build or re-build yourself from the ground-up.

The process of building a part of myself from the ground-up helped me to be willing and able to build other parts of myself from the ground-up. In areas of myself where there was more consequence. It enabled me to bring one career to and end that I was satisfied with. And to be prepared to build a new one from the ground-up. It isn’t easy to set aside a couple of decades of progress up one career ladder to start-over down at the bottom rung. I found that I wanted all that previously climbing to matter, to be counted. But that other climbing didn’t really matter all that much. Learning to ride a motorcycle. Learning to be a beginner helped to make the state of mind adjustments I needed to get on with the present.

More recently, the whole world has undergone dramatic and unprecedented changes that has made almost every aspect of our lives uncertain and overshadowed with fears. For many people, myself included, the pandemic brought changes to the pace and presentation of our daily lives. Before the pandemic came, I was working in a large corporate centre alongside hundreds of others. I went about my day-to-day business as a fifty-plus-year-old member of my community in my own way. I shopped for groceries or other goods and services when and how I preferred to. I obtained medical services when needed then – and, unfortunately, this was with increasing frequency. Most things were reasonably convenient.

For me and for everyone else, in March of 2020, however, the reliable and predictable parts of our lives suddenly weren’t.

Health issues. Career Issues. We all had to wear masks and curtail our usual habits of daily living. Living arrangements that had been working just fine suddenly needed to change. Many people lost their jobs, temporarily or permanently. I was extremely fortunate that the pandemic resulted in being newly-established as a home-based worker doing the same work I had already been doing. But that relative good luck didn’t mean that the world and my daily-life wasn’t suddenly very different, very stressful and requiring some different approaches to life. I still needed to do my best to be healthy and happily content in my daily life.

So I decided to tackle another long-standing ambition. I decided to begin learning Tai Chi.

Deciding to learn Tai Chi during the social distancing social and regulatory environment of 2020 and 2021 meant that the only viable sources of expert guidance were to be found via the internet. And there’s no shortage of potential experts to choose from. Frankly, I was quite pleased to learn in the seclusion of my own home. Compared to the possibility of dropping a motorcycle or launching myself into some unforgiving obstacle amid a group of peers, waving my limbs around with a group of strangers in a group class is the more intimidating idea. At least motorcycle gear provides a degree of anonymity. Self-conscious to a state of mortification? Strap a motorcycle helmet (preferably with a tinted visor) to your head. Problem solved.

Which brings up the matter of “gear”. With a motorcycle, the requisite gear includes protective equipment from head to toe. Helmet. Gloves. Sturdy Leather jacket and boots. Etcetera. Riding without the gear is dumb. The idea is to reduce one’s risk and vulnerability during an inherently vulnerable and dangerous activity. Meanwhile, with Tai Chi, I seem to get away with loose, light clothing such as a pair of baggy sweat pants and a t-shirt plus a pair of moccasins or socks. My Tai Chi gear isn’t designed to provide protection in the event of an eighty kilometer per hour crash. It is designed to allow movement and flexibility. My motorcycle gear hid and protected my frail forty plus year old body. My tai chi gear un-inhibits and connects me with my my even more frail fifty year old body.

Thanks to the generosity of Youtube’s community of content providers and potential Tai Chi experts I was able to find a few teachers who were offering free, reasonably detailed and easy to follow instructions on how to get started with the one hundred and eight movements contained within the martial art known as Tai Chi.

One hundred and eight movements!

It seems to be an established perception that the physics of motorcycling is like life itself -a complex and imperfectly understood thing. I’m not certain if anyone has taken the trouble to catalog the number of critical motions and combinations of motions that are required for riding. A dozen? Two dozen? Whatever the exact number may be – it surely pales compared to Tai Chi’s one hundred and eight.

After years of on-again, off-again Tai Chi practice, I am still an utter beginner. I rely on about a dozen movements that I enjoy. I no longer feel a nagging, hurky-jerky impulse to correct myself or remind myself how to move. I still move far more quickly than I think that I should and I don’t quite feel that I’m able to extend my range of motion much over what I had twelve or fifteen months earlier. But I feel that I have taken control over my own process of learning.

Whether riding a motorcycle or learning to waggle my limbs in something that approaches a synchronized and intentional way, I am learning a new physical ability. Let’s not call it a skill yet. With the motorcycle, I was tremendously satisfied with the confidence and courage that I acquired as I learned. Learning something new, something with its own immediate risk but not with potentially dire life consequences, is a terrific way to relearn who you are physically, intellectually and emotionally. With Tai Chi, I am experiencing the same learning and self-connection.

There is a maxim that is recited in any number of training environments that goes something like… “slow is smooth and smooth is fast”. While learning these activities, the good sense of the phrase emerges in different ways. With the bike, taking time to learn how to operate the clutch; how to smoothly change gears, how to be in control and attentive without being over-stimulated is a better done at slow speeds…and over time. With Tai Chi, learning to move slowly, how to be in control of my breathing and movements without over-stimulating is just as challenging.

I don’t regret deferring the experience of riding a motorcycle until I was in my mid-forties. At that age, I’d out-grown the dangerously immature craving for speed that I had as a younger person. What I know also know is that the deferral provided an enjoyable fulfillment of an existential need to step out of a state of mind that didn’t leave room for me to be an eager and joyful beginner. In a way, deferring the pleasure of riding until my forties and the pleasure of learning tai chi until my fifties have been much-needed opportunities to rearrange and enhance my sense of identity and my ability to cope with significant forces and events in my life over which I have little to no control.

Copyright © 2020-2026 by Eric Adriaans. All rights reserved.
Leviathan: The Biographia Isocratica of Adrian Kun

September 24th, 2020

Written and collected by the light of a coal-oil lamp over the course of twenty-five years, my Leviathan is a mix of allegorical blank verse, allusive haiku and updated sonnet forms. Leviathan is geographically rooted in Ontario from the boreal forests of Thunder Bay, Ottawa and Sault Ste. Marie to the Carolinian forests of Southwestern Ontario.

This 124-page softcover book was published (ISBN 978-0-9950966-0-8) in 2017. Limited quantities are still available. Use the contact page to inquire. The book was made possible with the generous support of family, friends and a modest readership.

To aspiring authors and poets, I urge you to undertake even a modest self-publishing and promotion project of this type. You won’t be disappointed.

To potential readers, I offer the title poem below:

Leviathan

Beneath a perfect blue sky and a friendly sun

I heard you commenting on the gentle breeze and promising horizon

With your fantastic careless smile, you seemed

To conquer the limitless moment which I feared.

And I wondered if you knew that

Though you tried to bury its enormity

Beneath blue and heavy waters,

Still it breathed – “I am massive,

I am leviathan.”

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