Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig is a book that opens countless possibilities for the mind to explore. I don't want to dwell on its plot or characters, except briefly. At its centre is a man travelling across America on a motorcycle with his son, carrying the weight of a past he cannot entirely escape. Having endured profound psychological struggles, he attempts to understand where everything went wrong. Motorcycle maintenance becomes a way of examining life itself. Unable to repair his past, he searches for meaning in a future whose shape remains uncertain. I want to share some personal thoughts this book awakened in me, thoughts that have stayed with me ever since. I've travelled across America several times, and I'm about to take to the road once again, this time to Montana, where Pirsig himself once taught in Bozeman, already wrestling with the ideas that would eventually transform his life.
The Future Comes From Behind
Life is travel.
You drive consciously toward the future, from state to state. You meet people, spend nights in motel rooms, and have breakfast in small local diners. Every mile seems to carry you further from the person you once were.
I always thought this was the natural direction of life: leaving the past behind while moving toward the future.
But Pirsig introduced me to a different way of understanding time. He reflects on an ancient Greek conception in which the future approaches from behind, unseen and unexpected, while the past stretches before our eyes.
If that is so, what exactly am I travelling toward? And what am I leaving behind?
Perhaps I'm travelling toward a past I'm continually trying to correct, using every new mile as another opportunity to change something that can no longer be changed.
The future cannot truly stand before my eyes because my attention is so often directed toward what has already happened. I revisit memories, reconsider decisions, and imagine different endings to stories that have long since concluded.
Meanwhile, the future arrives without asking permission. Sometimes it fulfils my expectations. Sometimes it destroys them.
And the present?
At times, I wonder whether there is any present at all, or whether what I call the present is simply the fleeting meeting point of memory and possibility. The moment I try to grasp it, it has already become part of my past.
I can learn almost anything while travelling, consuming mile after mile of open road. But learning requires the right attitude, and that may be the hardest thing to maintain, especially when you're trying to leave so much behind.
How many things did I want to accomplish but never did because I exchanged movement for the stagnation of comfort?
My mind reaches toward one life while my body continues along the familiar roads of another.
I try to understand myself, but this elusive Self, the one that supposedly tells me who I am, keeps slipping beyond my understanding.
Perhaps that's why I'm preparing to hit the road again.
To keep looking.
What am I, after all? My body or my mind? My memories or my present understanding of the world?
The Roads We Choose to Follow
I stare through the windshield while driving and see death disguised as my past, passing endlessly before me.
Then I glance into the rearview mirror and imagine the future wearing the mask of life, always approaching, always just beyond my ability to catch it.
Somewhere between these two directions, I search for the Self hidden behind my eyes, the part of me that seems to promise it will never disappear.
Death is a natural conclusion of biology. Yet something in the human mind resists accepting that conclusion as the whole story.
Perhaps the road unfolding before me offers the illusion that I can outrun my mortality.
There are paths that must be walked, difficult paths full of thorns, uncertainty, and hardship. Yet how often do I choose the freeway instead, joining those endless processions of people moving in the same direction?
Like everyone else, I have a car.
Like so many people, I live in a city where traffic stretches from one intersection to another. Car after car, bumper to bumper, an endless line in which turning left or right seems impossible.
Sometimes I feel as though I'm simply waiting for life to pass while sitting in traffic.
And then the questions return.
Can I experience my own death? Or is my death something only others will experience?
Perhaps we never encounter our own absence. Perhaps we only encounter the absence of those who once travelled beside us.
I want to follow acceptable roads, pleasing those who might give me the opportunity to reach the top. Yet the top of someone else's world can become the lowest point of my own.
Why can't I be like those people who make their own roads, slowly, through pain and uncertainty?
They seem willing to carry the weight of their choices rather than surrender them to the expectations of others.
Meanwhile, I sometimes feel that I live inside an imitation of life, something made of plastic and filled with crowds.
I'm travelling through my life as a lonely traveller, imitating the movements of others while trying to appear as though I belong among them.
My road keeps unfolding, and I keep hoping I won't stop at the wrong door, only to be welcomed once again into a life that was never truly mine.
Finding the Present in Movement
Sometimes I feel that I live inside patterns of traffic lights and road signs.
Everything appears predictable. The road continues, the signals change, and I follow the familiar instructions.
Then someone close to me dies.
Suddenly, the pattern breaks.
A hole appears in the map of my perception, yet the world continues moving as though nothing has happened. My car keeps travelling, but something essential is missing.
The chain has been disrupted. A link is gone.
Perhaps that's why we hold on to the tombstones of loved ones or to the ordinary possessions they leave behind. We try to preserve a pattern that can no longer exist in quite the same way.
A familiar object becomes a connection to a familiar world.
And still, life continues.
There are so many questions and so few years in which to explore them.
I know only that I must keep moving, though perhaps movement doesn't always mean travelling somewhere. Sometimes it means allowing an old understanding to change. Sometimes it means finding the courage to leave behind an expectation, a fear, or a version of myself that no longer belongs to the life I'm living.
For me, stagnation feels like an endless red light at the crossroads of an unlived life.
Movement is not necessarily escape. At its best, it is an invitation to participate more fully in existence.
The present may be impossible to hold still, but perhaps that is precisely its nature. It unfolds through change, through experience, through the small and often unnoticed transitions that make up a human life.
I may never fully understand who I am, or where the road is taking me.
But perhaps I don't need to understand everything before continuing.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig offers some answers, but more importantly, it encourages us to ask better questions.
And perhaps that is what I have carried from the book into my own travels.
So often, I ask myself the wrong questions and become trapped in answers that never needed to be found.
Maybe the art of maintaining a life begins not with fixing everything that has gone wrong, but with learning to pay attention to the road we're already travelling.
About the Author
Kirill Khrestinin is a Russian-American novelist and filmmaker based in Louisville, Kentucky. He has independently published six books and hosts a podcast with more than 160 episodes. His travels across America continue to inform his reflections on life, identity, and the human experience. Discover his books and writing at: kirillkhrestinin.com