Harley and Me

Our risk is our cure.

—LEE UPTON

“Female Motorcycle Riders Feel Happier, More Confident and Sexier Than Women Who Don’t Ride,” reads the press release from a motorcycle manufacturer detailing a study said to demonstrate this finding. Though it’s a blatant effort to sell motorcycles to a mostly untapped market, the study nonetheless offers interesting insight.

Describing the responses of some two thousand women—half motorcycle riders, half not—the 2013 study finds that riding a motorcycle greatly improves a woman’s feelings of overall self-worth. More than twice as many women riders report always feeling happy, nearly four times as many say they always feel sexy, and nearly twice as many always feel confident. Most important to me, more than half of women riders cite their motorcycle as a key source of happiness, and nearly three in four believe their lives have improved since they started riding.

Obviously, motorcyclists don’t have a monopoly on happiness. Many factors contribute to feelings of wholeness, completeness, and joy—the stuff I’m after. According to psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, one of the most crucial components of happiness is what he calls “flow state.”

As he describes it, flow is the mental state in which a person performing an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, completely caught up in and enjoying the process of the activity, not thinking about its potential outcome or payoff.

When in a flow, “nothing else seems to matter; the experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.” You’re so wholeheartedly immersed in what you’re doing that you cease to be aware of yourself as a separate entity. You lose yourself in the experience.

And if you’re like me, you might also forget to eat and sleep.

This is how I feel when riding Izzy Bella. I don’t wish I was somewhere else or doing something else. I’m fully present and focused to a single point of consciousness. I also try to tap into this pointed focus when I run with Rebecca or have deep conversations with close friends. Backpacking and hiking, writing, reading, knitting, and dancing around my kitchen chopping vegetables for soup can bring on the same state.

But when I go home after a flow-state adventure, I feel the disparity between that engrossed, tuned-in aliveness and the leaden numbness that surrounds me in my marriage.

Some might argue that since I spend the majority of my time doing things that provide deep and abiding happiness, I shouldn’t complain about the times I don’t. But that’s a sticking point. The more joy I feel, the more capacity for joy I possess, and the more aware I am of the parts of my life that chafe. Looking for joy now that I see the bareness of my marriage feels riskier than ever—and more important.

Risk taking is one key way to access this flow state, and there are many outlets to attain it. The commonly held idea is that risk takers are motivated by a pathological need to exorcise deep-seated fears or are compensating for underlying flaws. But Csikszentmihalyi sees just the opposite. The risk taker’s enjoyment derives not from the danger itself, he maintains, but from her ability to minimize it. Rather than experiencing a morbid thrill from courting disaster, the risk taker enjoys the perfectly healthy, positive emotion of being able to influence potentially dangerous forces.

“What people enjoy is not the sense of being in control, but the sense of exercising control in difficult situations,” he writes.

But here’s the catch: It’s not possible, Csikszentmihalyi says, to experience a feeling of control unless you’re willing to give up the safety of protective routines. Only when a doubtful outcome is at stake, and you’re able to influence that conclusion, can you know whether you’re in control.

• • •

I completely understand that my immersion in the motorcycle culture and my father’s death are eternally entwined. A year after buying my first motorcycle, I still grieve my father’s passing even as I discover a new freedom. There is no longer a parent watching over my shoulder to see if I am being the good Catholic girl, fulfilling the saintly aspiration my parents sought for me. I was named for Saint Bernadette, who had visions of the Virgin Mary and dug a spring in Lourdes, France, whose waters are said to have miraculous healing powers. My parents had been told they couldn’t have children. Twelve years after they married, and four years after they adopted my brother Frank, my conception was, for them, a divine act. I was to be their holy child, the one who redeemed others. Though they never said so in as many words, I believed I was the one who was sent to heal my ailing mother—an expectation I repeatedly failed to meet.

Being the incarnation of all things holy has become a burden. I am ready to give up my saint’s stained halo and the desire to be flawless. To do so, though, requires I also give up just about everything I think I know about myself.

I have taken the first step. J and I got into an argument recently over Hope’s cell phone bill. Just another of the daily challenges that married people with children face, but for me, it was the breaking point. Our arguments had always gone around in circles, lasting for hours and getting us nowhere. The futility was too much.

“I’m done,” I told him. “I can’t do this anymore.”

He sputtered and got angry and didn’t want to believe me. “After all I’ve done for you,” he scolded.

But I repeated myself a few days later when we met with the couple’s counselor. “I no longer want to be married.”

“We might as well quit therapy, then,” he said, and turned on the deep freeze.

It had taken months to summon the words, to rally the courage to spit them out. I didn’t know what would come next and I wasn’t quite ready to move on. Hope was a senior in high school. J and I had decided we’d stay in the same house, living together as a family, until she graduated. But he’d told the kids and both his and my family about the pending separation without discussing it with me. I was furious.

• • •

Though I’ve given up my saint’s halo, I still find solace in spiritual practice. I’m leaving this weekend to spend Rosh Hashanah with a group of women in a rented house in Ventura, a beach town midway between Los Angeles and Santa Barbara. I need some time to center myself. The plan is to have a simple Rosh Hashanah dinner on Sunday night and then take a high-speed catamaran to Santa Cruz Island—one of the amazing Channel Islands off the coast. We plan a day of hiking and open-water kayaking, a way of communing with God through nature and starting the Jewish New Year.

I am obviously not Jewish, but I join in the evening’s ritual meal with delight, asking questions about the food, the holiday of the New Year, the coming of Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement), and its rituals. Why do Jewish holidays always start at sundown when, as Catholics, we always started our holy days with the new day? When the sundown tradition is explained to me, I welcome the idea of walking through the darkness, waiting for the light of the holiday to bring illumination into my life.

One of the women explains tashlich, a ritual performed on Rosh Hashanah in which participants gather up leftover challah from the meal and carry it to running water—a stream, a lake, or the ocean. People then cast the bread upon the waters, letting go of sins from the past year. Our group isn’t planning to undertake this ritual tonight. But for me, it strikes a nerve.

I feel a need for forgiveness and ask the ladies if they’ll join me in the rite of tashlich. We take flashlights to the beach a block from the house, feel the sand that had been hot enough to burn our feet only a few hours earlier now cool and damp between our toes. The moon is almost nonexistent. The ocean’s waves make a lacy scrim barely discernable in the flashlights’ dim glow.

As a kid, my siblings and I made communion wafers out of Wonder Bread, its texture perfect—soft, white, pliable—to form little discs. This challah, though, feels coarse with sharp crusts like the pieces of glass that feel lodged in my lungs whenever I think about divorce. I tear the bread into little pieces, lots and lots of pieces for all the things I need to let go.

First off, being a devoted wife. I toss a piece into the ocean. I spent twenty-five years faithful, giving my heart and soul to my family only to find myself profoundly alone at the end of each day. This is especially true over the past decade when I have been unable to ignore the constant, low-grade ache of loneliness. To stay in the marriage and fake devotion is to do us both a grave disservice. But I mourn the wife I set out to be.

I heave another piece of bread into the ocean—my ambition to be a perfect mother. J and I raised three wonderful young people. The work we did as parents is a testament to our love of them and our desire to be the best parents we could, an aspiration that trumped our need to be good spouses. I will have to give up the mantle of the virtuous mother. A good mother doesn’t leave her children’s father. She keeps the family together at any cost, is the glue that binds it all together. But I lost my glue long ago.

I pitch bread for the marriage I thought I was building all those years, for the household we created. Another piece of challah for the many hardships we weathered: J’s almost fatal pulmonary embolism, Neil’s near-drowning at age three and, in high school, his diagnosis with a severe anxiety disorder. Then there was the death of J’s mother and the passing of my father. We’d been able to endure those hardships as a couple, difficulties that might have ended our marriage long before. But rather than strengthening the bond, the troubles piled on top of each other, burdening our relationship with a weight we couldn’t escape. My sin, I suppose, was in letting it happen, not speaking up sooner, not knowing how to redirect the trajectory.

I lob bread for the young woman I was when I paired up with J at twenty-two, impressionable, looking for security at any cost. I chuck another piece for the older, wiser, and flintier woman I’ve since become, staring down the barrel of fifty. Bread tossed away, like the hours of my life, the dreams and hopes I must relinquish in order for other, new ones to arrive. I empty my hands of the challah.

• • •

Getting comfortable on the motorcycle is helping me become more at ease in this flow state. So much of my past has been spent striving—for an education, the right career, a good marriage, the best opportunities for my children, material goods, a sense of security. But I now see I placed too heavy a value on achieving those goals. Getting the things I want in life does not always fulfill me. Nor does it always work out.

As a young family, J and I struggled; we saved and sacrificed to buy a modest starter home when Jarrod was just one and we were still in our twenties. Two more children arrived and we lost that house to foreclosure eight years later when the real estate market plummeted. Still, unanticipated blessings followed that difficult experience. But only after I gave into the devastation and finally let go.

On the day I drove away from that home we’d painted and landscaped and built a patio for, we started over with nothing in savings, ruined credit, and three small children to raise. I felt failure, awash in shame.

We were sure we’d been cheated by the system. We’d played by the rules, saved diligently, been frugal, and still lost. However, I found the courage to make a decision I would never have made otherwise. I applied for a graduate program in creative writing, taking out student loans for the whole experience. Assuming debt seemed a risky course. But believing that I had nothing left to lose, a vitally enriching career became mine.

I take solace from one of Csikszentmihalyi’s discoveries about flow state. When a person’s life makes sense, he explains, the “fact that one is not slim, rich, or powerful no longer matters. The tide of rising expectations is stilled; unfulfilled needs no longer trouble the mind. Even the most humdrum experiences become enjoyable.”

I’m praying that this new perspective will pay off. Because, as Csikszentmihalyi reminds me, flow experiences are not necessarily pleasant at the time they occur. “The swimmer’s muscles might have ached during his most memorable race, his lungs might have felt like exploding, and he might have been dizzy with fatigue—yet these could have been the best moments of his life.” Gaining control of one’s life is never easy, and many times, quite painful. But in the long run, optimal experiences add up to a sense of determining the content of one’s life. And that, he argues, “comes as close to what is usually meant by happiness as anything we can conceivably imagine.”

• • •

Yom Kippur approaches and I decide that since Rosh Hashanah was so helpful, I’ll observe the atonement holy day as well. I find it odd that Rosh Hashanah, the New Year, precedes the Day of Atonement, that the sweetness of the New Year comes first, apples dipped in honey, when the fasting had yet to begin. But maybe that’s human nature. We need a taste of the sweetness to lure us into doing the hard work.

I go to Catholic Mass in the morning on Yom Kippur and pray not in words but in silent groans that express unfocused desires. The Day of Atonement, I learn, is a time to ask to be released from any contracts we’ve been unable to keep in the past year. I entered into my marriage contract willingly and spoke those vows. But I see now I was not sufficiently formed at the time to understand their full meaning. I was a woman with considerable emotional wounds. The daughter of a mentally ill mother who used alcohol to medicate her symptoms, I was desperately seeking a man who would keep me from going crazy and perhaps get me to tone down my own drinking. Too frantic for someone to save me from myself, I was unable to make those vows in a substantive way. Kneeling at Holy Redeemer Catholic Church on Yom Kippur, inviting divine absolution and love, I come up with the words to ask that I be released from that contract.

Then I ask for the courage to release old loyalties, to let go of the conflicting values that have kept me locked in place, to find a new belief system that might see me into the next part of my life. I can’t see what that new life looks like just yet, but I can feel it taking shape somewhere beyond my field of vision and I want to open my arms to greet it.

I don’t hear angels singing God’s acceptance of my request, nor do the heavens part and doves descend. After I’ve destroyed a boxful of tissues, I leave the church, my heart half a gram lighter.

Yom Kippur is a day of fasting. But as a Catholic, I’ve always been terrible at abstinence, claiming hypoglycemia or any excuse rather than admit that hunger makes me irritable, anxious, and scared. But this day feels important. I need to atone for my part in the end of this marriage. So I fast. Oddly, it is not nearly the ordeal I feared and that tells me something crucial. Yes, there is a mild headache as the day wears on. My stomach groans and I feel a bit weakened. But the hours pass. I feel good, as if I’m doing my part in the process of absolution.

I ride Izzy Bella to the “break fast” meal with the same group of women from Rosh Hashanah. The power of my motorcycle seems to balance the sense of weakness and hunger. Without the bike, I sometimes fear I might cease to exist. The taste of food is heavenly after a day of abstinence, the flavors made richer by hunger.

A few weeks later, during a four-hour car ride in which I’m held captive, J hammers me with demands. We have kept separate finances for most of our marriage since we couldn’t agree on how much debt each was willing to live with. He took on the household expenses, while I paid for the kids’ activities—private school and later college, dorm fees, music lessons, tutoring, summer camp, clothes. Since I don’t want to be married to him, he tells me, I am to pay my own utilities, health insurance, food, and gasoline. I will learn later that he took me off his work-sponsored health insurance without telling me.

The next morning, I pack a small suitcase. In previously discussing what we’d do with the house, J had made it clear that he was not going to leave it without a court order. I’m too worn out to fight him anymore. I tell Hope what is happening. She and I hold each other, gripping on. I don’t want to leave her and Jarrod, our dog, our home. The idea that we could abide amicably until Hope finishes high school in seven months is untenable.

I move out of the family house into a one-room guesthouse with a fold-down bed, a tiny kitchenette, and gorgeous west-facing windows that paint the wooden floors golden in the afternoon light. The new life I cannot yet see is gaining an outline.

• • •

Flow, according to Csikszentmihalyi, “is what the painter feels when the colors on the canvas begin to set up a magnetic tension with each other, and a new thing, a living form, takes shape in front of the astonished creator.”

I feel nothing as glorious living now on my own. I am depressed and tired of waiting for the tide to change and my outlook to improve.

Contrary to what we often believe and sometimes mindlessly seek, flow moments do not occur when we’re passive, simply enjoying ourselves in a receptive mode, like lying on a South Seas beach and breathing in beauty. It’s not something that happens to us; it’s something we make happen. Optimal moments typically occur when our body or mind is taken to its limit in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile. “For a child, it could be placing with trembling fingers the last block on a tower she has built, higher than any she has built so far; for a swimmer, it could be trying to beat his own record; for a violinist, mastering an intricate musical passage. For each person there are thousands of opportunities, challenges to expand ourselves,” Csikszentmihalyi says.

This, I suspect, has something to do with what the addiction specialist Lejuez told me about the “learned industriousness theory.” Our personalities, our brain chemicals, our bodies: They all fire up and feel good when we challenge ourselves and lose ourselves in what we’re doing.

Riding my motorcycle can still trigger terror at what I am doing. But when I get into a flow state, my fears, my grief, my worries about how I’ll survive now that I’ve left my marriage—all these are out of sight, out of mind. But that flow is cut off when I stop riding and find myself again in a state of anxiety. The more comfortable I get in the saddle, the more I renew hope that things will improve. I may have to use calm breathing exercises and talk myself down to get to that place. Once I’m in that flow, it turns out to be eminently worth the effort. The same is true for all risky endeavors. The focus required is so intense that in that act of focusing, our fears and worries slip out the back door, leaving only concentration and a sense of wholeness.

And that—wholeness—is precisely what I’m after, even as I’m not sure what I’m doing. In order to leave my marriage, I have to embrace the fact that such a choice will hurt me financially, socially, and emotionally. It’s likely I will lose the house we bought, triumphantly, after the hideous foreclosure. Likewise, the cost of living separately will require financial sacrifice. Can I trust that I’ll be okay, that my decision will not ultimately cost my children? Financial advisors tell us all to be more conservative with our investments as we age. But there’s no way around this risk, this gamble of losing out, if I wish to be fully alive.

Next there’s the emotional estrangement. My sister called a few days ago when she’d heard about the split. Hoping for a few words of consolation and compassion, I was stunned to hear her admonish me. “You can’t expect to do something like this and not have people be mad at you,” she said. The same thing from my oldest friend. “Let me get this straight: You’re leaving your marriage because your husband is boring?” My stepmother, at first seeming supportive, went on to tell me how much she misses my father. “Not a day goes by that I don’t talk to him, don’t think of him. Still,” she said, “I’m so glad he’s dead and not here to see what you did to poor J.”

I feel shunned, adrift, and begin learning that authenticity comes at a price. Will I have the inner resources to pay? Over the coming few months, family and friends break into two camps: those who want to remain friends with me, and those who need to keep their distance, as if divorce fever is a virus that is contagious.

And yet, the science of flow teaches that all these risks may be worthwhile. I need to keep in mind that optimal experiences are an end to themselves. I am standing up for myself, claiming myself. That is my reward.

My heart on many days feels as if it is made of Jell-O, warm and creepy Jell-O that leaks all over me, staining my hands that artificial red as I try to force it back into the shape of a heart. The stickiness is everywhere.

Yet, in my new place, I enact fresh rituals. I light candles and meditate and allow myself to feel as deeply as I can. I walk to the grocery store and buy only what I can carry home, a reminder that I’m on my own now and need to care for myself. Give us this day our daily bread. I cook in much smaller quantities—dinner for one—and am learning to find joy in doing so. I live a block from my daughter’s high school and invite her to join me for homework, dinner, or a sleep-over regularly. I help her with college applications. I’m learning how to be an active mother even when not sharing quarters with my children. And I ache in a new way—not the old familiar ache of loneliness within a coupled facade, but the ache of reconstruction.

I remember reading about caterpillars turning into butterflies. It’s not like the caterpillar gives up one leg—I can manage without one leg this week—in exchange for, say, a wing, allowing transformation to happen little by little, piece by piece. No. The caterpillar basically becomes mush, ceasing to exist as a caterpillar during the time of transformation, becoming a blob of plasma for as long as it takes to re-form as a butterfly. I’m in that amorphous state. Neither wife nor single. Neither full-time mom nor absent mom. Neither the scared young girl who said “I do” in a church all those years ago, nor the woman who is learning to live fully on her own.

It’s a tender-to-the-bone kind of transformation filled with ragged edges and messiness. But it’s real and feels genuine. I’m grateful for tashlich, for flow, for Rosh Hashanah, for Catholic Mass, for Yom Kippur, for my rituals that are being redesigned to fit this new reality. I am grateful for my children’s willingness to try to understand my choice even though it hurts them. These are the ceremonies and graces that will one day deliver me into my nascent, new life.

Csikszentmihalyi writes that a person who has achieved control over her psychic energy, and has invested it in consciously chosen goals, cannot help but grow into a more complex being. “By stretching skills, by reaching toward higher challenges, such a person becomes an increasingly extraordinary individual.”

Further, Csikszentmihalyi gives me a great gift in the form of a story about an indigenous tribe, the Shuswap, in British Columbia. The elders of the tribe noticed that at times, the world became too predictable and all the challenge and excitement began to ebb out of life. Without challenge, the elders knew, life for the tribe would lose its meaning.

To upset this complacency, every twenty to thirty years the elders decided the entire village should move. The entire population relocated to a different part of the Shuswap land, forcing the tribe to confront new landscape, new problems in procuring food and water. As a result of that upset and change, life regained meaning and value. The tribe members felt rejuvenated and healthy.