By Roshan Jayasinghe
I have heard Take the Long Way Home so many times that I no longer choose it, and when it came on again recently I caught myself actually listening. Supertramp has travelled with me for so long that I cannot attach the liking to one year or one place. Different songs at different times and in different moods, but always that unmistakable sound capable of taking me backwards within seconds. When I first enjoyed this band I was not thinking about consciousness or truth or where this journey eventually takes us. I simply loved the music. This time a few familiar words seemed to connect with the way I have experienced parts of my own life, and it occurred to me that the song had not moved at all. I had.
Sport has always interested me, not because somebody wins and somebody loses but because of what human beings become capable of when ability and discipline and judgement finally arrive at the same place. The sports I follow closely change over the years, but that fascination remains, and because motorcycles have become such an important part of what I enjoy myself, much of it now finds its way into watching riders who really know what they are doing. Riding across different disciplines has changed what I see when I watch them. A fast track session gives me one experience, where braking and lines and precision become the whole of my attention for that period of time. Dirt asks something completely different, reading terrain that changes underneath me and sometimes allowing the motorcycle to move rather than fighting it. A short street ride can simply be the pleasure of the machine and the road for an hour. I enjoy them for different reasons. But adventure riding is where taking the long way home begins to make literal sense to me.
With adventure riding I can leave knowing where I eventually want to arrive without knowing anything about what will happen before I get there. Hours become days, roads change, weather changes, plans change and sometimes I change with them. I can ride twelve hours in a day when there are far more comfortable ways of covering the same distance, and yet the destination is rarely the part I remember. I remember a particular corner. A mountain appearing ahead when I did not expect it. The temperature dropping as I climbed. Stopping in a small town I had never heard of, talking to somebody at a gas station, being completely exhausted at the end of a long day and still knowing I would not exchange that day for the shorter route. Sometimes a wrong turn becomes the best memory of the journey. Eventually I arrive, park the motorcycle and take off my helmet, and physically I am back exactly where I intended to return, but the rider who comes home carries experiences the rider who left did not have. Something learned about the road, about another person, about my own limitations, or simply another question that entered my mind somewhere along the way.
I seem to take long roads in other parts of life too. I enjoy people and conversation and the particular pleasure of hearing how somebody else arrived at the way they understand things. Somebody says something I have never heard before and I want to know whether it is actually true, so I read about it and compare explanations and try to find where the facts are. Sometimes that person was right, sometimes wrong, and quite often both of us understood only a small part of something much larger. I do not need every conversation to finish with me being right. I would rather leave knowing something I did not know when it started. You begin with a question thinking the answer may be nearby, take one road into it, discover another, and before long you realize that understanding almost anything properly requires travelling much further than you first expected.
Life itself works this way. When we are young we want to become adults, and then come careers and families and whatever else represents success to each of us, and we reach one destination and almost immediately set another one further ahead. Age gives us something youth cannot, which is enough road behind us to turn around occasionally and look at where we have travelled. I find that increasingly interesting, not because I want to live in the past but because experience lets me compare what I once thought I knew with what life has actually shown me. Some ideas survived and others did not. Things I was absolutely certain about at thirty now make me smile, and I am quite prepared for something I believe today to make me smile again years from now. If I learn something tomorrow that corrects something I believe this morning, I have not lost anything. I have travelled a little further.
And then a larger thought followed, which is that I may have been taking the word home too literally. We arrive here somehow, conscious inside these extraordinary biological bodies, and begin experiencing a world we initially understand almost nothing about. We learn and love and fear and fail and remember. We become attached to people and eventually we lose some of them, and what stays afterwards is rarely what we expected to keep. Not the large occasions but the small ordinary things we would have forgotten entirely if they had not stopped happening. Then, regardless of wealth or position or nationality or anything else we accumulate along the way, the body that carried us through the entire journey reaches its end. That much we know. What happens past that point is where what we know runs into one of the oldest questions we have.
Human beings have spent thousands of years trying to understand whether anything exists beyond the end of biological life, and we use words like soul and spirit and consciousness for things we are still trying to understand. I cannot honestly say that I know what the soul is, or whether consciousness can exist independently of the body, or whether anything about us continues at all. I would rather admit that than turn something I hope for into something I call fact. But not knowing has never stopped me wondering, and this is where those familiar words unexpectedly took me. What if this human lifetime is itself the long way home, and whatever we call the soul is the traveller, and all of this is simply an extraordinary opportunity to experience one particular realm through sight and sound and touch and thought? I cannot prove any of it and I do not offer it as religion or science. It is a thought, and it makes me look at the experiences of a life differently.
From there the road becomes more interesting than our obsession with arriving. The adventure rides matter because I experienced them. A day in the dirt matters in a different way because it let me experience something particular while I was here. Sitting with friends I have known for decades and laughing about something ridiculous we did at twenty matters because we were there together and we are still here. Watching a brilliant rider work at the edge of what a human being can do matters because I am alive and able to recognize what I am seeing. Meeting somebody whose view is nothing like mine matters because that conversation might show me something I had never considered. Even the ordinary days we hardly remember are part of this strange opportunity of experiencing what it is to be human. That does not mean I believe everything happens for a predetermined reason, because I do not know that either. It simply makes me appreciate how extraordinary it is that we are here to experience any of it at all.
Which brings me back to Supertramp. The young man who first enjoyed Take the Long Way Home heard a great song from a band he loved. The man listening now hears exactly the same music carrying completely different cargo: years, friendships, work, motorcycles, wrong turns, losses, and an enormous amount still left to learn. The song remained almost perfectly still while I travelled an enormous distance around it, and one day I came back to discover that although the music had not changed, the person listening to it had. I do not need it to explain my existence and I certainly do not believe a song has answered anything. It gave me something I value more, which is another question. Maybe this whole lifetime is the longest road any of us will ever travel. Maybe all of it is simply what being biologically alive amounts to and nothing more. What an extraordinary question to be able to ask while I am still here to ask it. Until then I intend to keep riding and listening and laughing and questioning and collecting whatever this road still has left. And if there really is a home beyond this journey, then perhaps when my ride here is over I will find that I simply took the long way home.
Author’s Note
I have loved Supertramp for as long as I can remember, and Take the Long Way Home is a song I have listened to countless times. This article is not an interpretation of what the band intended by it, and I am not trying to give their lyrics a meaning that belongs to me. It is only where those familiar words happened to take my own thoughts, many more years into the journey than when I first heard them.
