A personal reflection on how I have come to observe the mind through life, change, riding, and quiet attention.
By Roshan Jayasinghe
As I ride into my sixty second year, I find myself noticing not only life, but the mind through which I have lived it.
The road has a way of bringing these things to the surface.
When I ride, I am reminded that a wheel is not only movement. It is relationship. The hub holds the centre. The spokes carry the tension and keep the wheel true. The rim gives the wheel its form. But it is the tyre that meets the road first. It takes the bumps, the roughness, the heat, and where it can, it cushions the impact before it reaches deeper into the wheel. If the road is taken well, the wheel continues in balance. If the impact travels too deeply, the whole structure feels it.
Life, as I have experienced it, does not seem very different.
Maybe that is why I return so often to the wheel in my writing. Not just because it turns, but because every part of it matters. Centre, connection, structure, contact. And in some quiet way, what I have long called my mind seems to reveal itself through something similar.
As I experience it, so much of the mind feels adjustable. What I liked as a teenager is not always what I value now. What once felt urgent may now seem small. What I once dismissed may now have meaning. What once seemed fixed in me has often changed with time, age, hurt, love, experience, and reflection.
That is one of the things that fascinates me most.
Life has not shown me the mind as something fixed. It has shown me something that shifts, learns, resists, remembers, forgets, revises, and changes.
One could call that instability.
One could also call it aliveness.
One could say the mind is unreliable because what mattered once may no longer matter now.
One could also say it is intelligent because it is capable of seeing differently.
I do not say any of this as a conclusion. I say it only as something I have noticed in myself.
The longer I live, the less comfortable I feel defining the mind too neatly. The word is easy. The reality behind it is not. Thought, memory, image, reaction, fear, desire, imagination, identity, preference, reflection, all of it seems to gather under that one word. We say mind because we need a word for it, but I am not sure we always stop to notice what we are actually naming.
When I say my mind, I find myself wondering what I really mean.
Sometimes it feels like thought.
Sometimes memory.
Sometimes imagination.
Sometimes the inward voice that comments, judges, explains, fears, or protects.
Sometimes something broader than all of these together.
As I experience it, the mind does not feel like a neat object. It feels more like movement shaped by what it has travelled through. Childhood, family, praise, hurt, fear, love, loneliness, loss, culture, time, age, experience. All of it seems to leave something behind.
That is where the tree comes in for me too.
A tree shows itself above the ground, but it is shaped by what is below it. We see the trunk, the branches, the leaves, the lean, the fruit, the wounds. But none of that stands without roots. The roots are hidden, yet they feed everything visible.
That too feels true in how I have come to observe myself.
A reaction may appear in a moment, but something older may be feeding it.
A fear may feel immediate, but it may have lived there a long time.
A preference may feel personal, yet it may be shaped by memory or repetition.
Even identity can feel that way, as though it has grown from roots I did not fully see while they were forming.
So often I notice the branches first. Only later do I wonder about the roots.
And somewhere between the wheel and the tree, I find myself simply observing.
Not trying to explain everything.
Not trying to solve life too quickly.
Just noticing.
Noticing that I can watch my own thoughts.
Noticing that memory can colour the present.
Noticing that fear can present itself as certainty.
Noticing that what I once believed strongly can soften or fall away with time.
Noticing that something in me is able to see all this movement.
That part matters to me.
Because if I were only every passing thought, every passing mood, every fear, every reaction, then life would feel far more unstable than it already does. But that is not how it has revealed itself to me. What I have noticed is that while everything moves, something in me can still observe the movement.
Maybe that is also why riding has always meant more to me than simply travelling from one place to another.
On a motorcycle, balance is not theory. It is reality. You do not ride by argument. You ride by relationship. Body, sight, timing, response, machine, road, wheel, gravity, all of it must meet honestly. If you do not respect reality, reality corrects you.
And life, in its own way, feels no different.
A thought about the corner is not the corner.
A story about the road is not the road.
The map is not the land.
That too is something I keep noticing in myself. How easily the mind creates commentary around life, and how easily one can start living inside that commentary instead of inside life itself.
So when I now use the words my mind, I do so more gently.
I am not trying to pin it down. I am simply speaking of the inward movement through which I seem to experience life. Thought moving, memory returning, imagination forming, identity reacting, fear appearing, preference shifting, meaning being made.
And as I ride into this year of my life, I can see clearly that the mind of my youth is not the mind of my life now. That alone says something. What I held, what I chased, what I feared, what I loved, what I dismissed, what I thought mattered, all of it has changed through living. The tyre kept meeting the road. The rim kept holding form. The spokes kept carrying tension. The hub kept needing to stay true. The branches kept growing and falling away. The roots kept feeding what I could not always see. Reality remained what it was.
And here I am, still watching.
Still watching what I have called mine.
Still noticing how much changes.
Still seeing that life has contact, structure, tension, and centre.
Still seeing that the tree is not only branches, but roots.
Still seeing that life asks for observation as much as it asks for thought.
Still seeing that reality is always more than my opinion of it.
That may be enough.
And perhaps that is all I really want to leave with the reader.
Not an explanation.
Not a teaching.
Just an honest observation.
When you say my mind, what do you feel you are referring to?
Your thoughts.
Your memories.
Your fears.
Your preferences.
Your identity.
Your inward commentary.
Or the whole movement of life within you.
And if all of that changes, as it surely does, then what is it in you that notices the change?
If you wish, just look quietly.
Look at what you once loved and no longer love in the same way.
Look at what has softened.
Look at what still returns.
Look at what has fallen away.
Look at your wheel and what it has rolled through.
Look at what is cushioning the road you meet.
Look at what is holding your form.
Look at what is carrying your tension.
Look at what remains central.
Look at your roots and what has fed your branches.
Look at reality as it is, not only as thought describes it.
Perhaps that is enough.
Author’s Note:
This reflection was written on my sixty second birthday, not to explain the mind, but simply to share how I have come to observe it through the road I have travelled, the wheel I keep returning to, and the roots and branches through which life continues to reveal itself.
About the Author
Roshan Jayasinghe is a writer and observer of human systems. His work explores the gap between man made constructs and lived humanity, with a focus on how economics, trade and everyday choices intersect with questions of fairness, responsibility and inner alignment. Through essays for publications in The Morning Telegraph, he aims to remind readers that they are not passengers in a fixed machine, but active custodians of a shared world.
