I have always had a long list of books that I just never got around to reading. Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was one of these that I actually picked up as a youngster, but didn’t get past the first couple of pages. After Matt left a comment about it, I finally re-started it.

I haven’t quite finished it yet, so I’ll reserve most of my judgments for later, but I’m finding it to be a good read. It has given me a desire for a road-trip… growing up in a small town in the middle of the desert, you almost yearn for long trips in a car. Dunno why… we didn’t have in-car video equipment or gameboys back then.

I also catch myself at times actually wanting to tune a motorcycle. Passion can be transfered. In my profession, there isn’t a lot of preventive maintenance… it is mostly about diagnosing problems after a hard drive crash. But that’s not Pirsig’s point. We all have a motorcycle to maintain— ourselves.

Some of us are like “John” (a character in the book), we put fuel in it when we need to, and when it breaks, we take it to the doctor for work on the plumbing. Others of us are like “Bob” (the main character), constantly monitoring ourselves… “Hrm, where did that twinge in my neck come from? Ah, yeah, I’m starting that new project with an aggressive deadline, let’s do a bit more yoga this morning, and go to bed early tonight.”

Some take this maintenance even further by attributing messages and meanings into everything from dreams to birds flying into windows.

The real interesting part about this analogy is how we have no owner’s manual— and it gets worse. No two motorcycles are the same. I’m a vegetarian with high cholesterol, so I have to exercise a lot more than my non-vegetarian wife who doesn’t.

Perhaps some of us are BMW’s, and require less maintenance. Others of us are constantly up on blocks. Either way, I think we end up loving our motorcycles because of maintenance, don’t you think?