MIND MOVES:There is always more to us than we know, writes TONY BATES
THE EARLY morning sky was ominous when we arrived early at the off-road training centre outside St Alban’s. We were there to complete a foundation course in manoeuvring motorbikes across tricky terrain full of steep hills and unnerving slopes. The dark clouds promised rain, which would make every surface a greasy mess and guarantee repeated bruising of both our bodies and our pride. And we were doing this for fun.
I was suited up in layers of body armour and a colourful jumpsuit and stood around like a sad cliché waiting to happen. A community of equally odd looking folk gathered on the wooden patio overlooking the “starter” track. We were strangers from different worlds; we had little in common but by the day’s end, the adventure we were about to share would forge a fierce bond of solidarity and mutual respect between us.
Why does someone rise at 4.30am on a wet Saturday morning, endure airport security and travel hundreds of miles to hazard themselves in such a painful enterprise as the one that awaited us all? Why leave a place where life feels cosy and predictable for a parallel universe full of pain, discomfort and uncertainty?
No doubt every individual who has braved an early morning exercise routine, travelled to a training session on a cold winter’s evening, or endured the social deprivation that is an inescapable part of mastering a musical instrument, has asked themselves these same questions.
We do it because the comfortable world we create is always too small for us; it lacks the grit that our souls need to grow. We are not one-
dimensional. We were never meant to live in one world but in multiple worlds, so that different facets of our personalities could come into being. There is always more to us than we know.
As I fired up the 230cc engine of my enduro bike, I realised this was it; there was no going back. We were all tentative in our first steps, but as the day progressed, our collective skills improved dramatically. You could feel morale rising and see people enjoying themselves and stretching themselves.
Success in any endeavour, no matter how big or small, is so good for our mental wellbeing. And what was so good about this course was the way they taught us the precise skills we needed to master each stage of the course and experience ourselves in a wholly new and positive way.
There were some other lessons I learned about mental health that day. I have always felt it important to live in the present moment, but it’s also important not to get fixated on moment-by-moment challenges and to keep part of your attention on where you ultimately want to arrive. When you’re biking on an off-road course and become too focused on “not skidding”, chances are that you will skid. But when I fixed my attention on where I wanted to arrive, my forward-looking focus carried me over the most difficult terrain.
Probably the clearest lesson of the day was to give up the notion that I had to “drive” my bike. The preferred term to driving used by the instructors was that we should “pilot” our bikes. This distinction was very evident by the end of the day as we returned to base. Whereas the day had started out with all of us gripping the clutch and accelerator and driving nervously, it ended with a group of people flying across fields, standing up rather than sitting down, and barely touching the controls.
We learned that it was not all about us. The key was forming a relationship of trust with our bike, and being willing to get out of its way and allow it to do its job when it came to challenging terrain.
Success also meant not allowing ourselves to be overly dazzled by dangers close to hand, but to keep in our awareness the objective we wanted to achieve.
And finally, when we step into parallel worlds that are unfamiliar to us, we must be willing to sacrifice a little of the “me” we have known, so that something as yet unknown and undiscovered can be born.
Tony Bates is founding director, Headstrong – the National Centre for Youth Mental Health (headstrong.ie)