"Way less uptight"

Under a sea of perfectly Carolina blue skies, a week-long Arctic blast gave way to cozy mid-60s temperatures. At least for a couple of days, Charlotte returned to its typical mild winter weather.

Despite several business calls that locked me in the house for most of the day, I escaped at about 2pm to hit the local tarmac and wander around my north Charlotte paradise.

Filled with farmlands, occasional twisties and rolling hills, and light in traffic, I headed north under the bright sun. It was just me and Beaute Noire, my 2013 BMW R 1200 R.

Thinking back to August 2017, this bike was all but dead to me. It ran terribly with intermittent idle issues and misfires at higher RPMs. But the Charlotte BMW dealership spent three months examining her, diagnosing her components, and ultimately replacing the fuel pump and cleaning up the electrical connections to the throttle position sensor. Frankly, this evaluation prevented Beaute Noire from heading to the scrap yard. Instead here she rides with me today - lightly, spiritedly, gracefully, and joyfully.

As I think about Beaute Noire’s transformation, I cannot help but to think of my own. Like my steed, I needed time away to decompress, internally evaluate what I was doing, fix broken aspects of my life, and return to a new state of improved being. Before my 7-month journey across the US two-and-half times, I summarized both my motorcycle and myself with one word: “finicky.”

But today as we ride, neither of us is finicky. We are free from our prior demons and happy in our new elements. We swapped out bad parts and replaced them with fresh ones. We idle smoothly. We interact with the people and environments around us with a sense of ease and enthusiasm. As one friend told me after my journey, I’m “way less uptight.” I say the same thing about Beaute Noire.

While riding today, I sought to do one thing - take the perfect photograph of the melting ice on this mid-60s afternoon. I searched high and low, along a dirt road, and through small neighborhoods looking for the right angle. I couldn’t find any until I stopped and thought about it for a minute.

There is a pretty pond around the corner from my home. Just two days ago, a thin layer of ice shielded the chilly water below it. Sure enough, even today some of that ice remained. I took my final picture of the afternoon, then headed home… non-finicky me and non-finicky Beaute Noire, both of whom are “way less uptight.”