Today, I unlocked a brand-new transportation method for getting around as I trek across the globe. While exploring the world by air, land, and sea, I can now add “motorcycle” to my list of options.

There are a lot of ways I’ve explored new territory over the years: car, truck, canoe, kayak, hang glider, hot air balloon, small diving boat, enormous cruise ship, giant airplane, small bush plane, train, electric scooter… in addition to the obvious ones like bicycles, roller skates, skateboards, and snowboards.

But I’ve never really cared about motorcycles at all until very recently. I was never enamored with them in the past, mainly because it seemed like riding them was so much work, and they seemed so incredibly dangerous.

So, that’s why I signed up to take a safety course when I decided to give motorcycles a try, even though that’s not required in my state (Arizona). I wanted to start out on this new journey with as much safety and training as possible.

What’s funny, though, is how, when I signed up for the course and took the test, my wife was completely mystified and almost angry.

“You signed up for WHAT? A motorcycle class? I’ve known you for two decades, and you have never—even once—mentioned wanting to ride a motorcycle… ever!”

I actually find this line of thinking to be quite funny. I have all kinds of interests that I don’t talk about with anyone… but that doesn’t mean I don’t have them.

I’ve never understood people who tell others what their plans are or those who make all their thoughts and interests known to everybody. I’m a thinker, a researcher, a “finder-outer” who just slowly, carefully feels his way through life, quietly wondering about possibilities and asking: “What if?”

I almost never announce anything to anyone about anything I do until it’s done.

If I’m going to do something, I’ll keep it to myself unless and until I decide it’s the right thing to do, and then I’ll go do it. Only then will it be time to tell others about it—after the fact.

This way of going through life has saved me from a lot of embarrassment over the years.

I’ve known so many people who make these big, grand announcements to everyone they know about all the things they’re going to do… but they end up not doing them, either because they had no business making such a claim in the first place, or because circumstances outside their control made it impossible.

So why create embarrassment for yourself by telling everybody something you don’t know is going to happen for sure? I guess I’m naturally like Michael Corleone in The Godfather III, where he says: “Never let anyone know what you’re thinking.”

There’s really only one exception here, and that’s with my immediate family: my wife and kids. If something big and important affects them, I’ll tell them.

In this case, I did feel it could affect them if I started riding a motorcycle, so I told my wife… after I signed up for the course.

She was so completely astonished; she couldn’t even believe it. I think she thought I was kidding. But no. I don’t kid.

If I were to take my wife’s question seriously (and while I am being lighthearted here, I did take her seriously and I did give her a solid answer), I still don’t know exactly why I want to start riding motorcycles.

I think it comes down to two specific reasons:

First, it’s mostly because I am, unapologetically, having a mid-life crisis. I yearn for new and interesting things to do and new ways to experience life while it’s not too late.

Second, it’s also because buying a convertible Mustang last year really opened my eyes to being out on the open road. I mean, really, out on the open road.

There’s a world of difference between sitting in the air-conditioned cab of a family sedan with soundproofing and nice, gentle music playing in the background as you politely leave one location and arrive at your destination.

But my attitude these days is mostly: FORGET THAT!

Gimme the top down, man! I want the wind blowing through my hair (or what’s left of it) and sunburn on my skin. I want to feel the rumble of my rickety suspension on the potholes, hear the loud road noise, and smell the dirt on the hills as I pass by them.

I like driving my Mustang with the top down (I prefer “topless,” as I like to say to my wife), where I can hear my own engine purring. It’s a totally different experience that way when you’re connected to the world around you rather than isolated in a nice, sterile chamber on wheels.

Driving with the open sky above me, I can smell the scent of wet pavement when it rains and the diesel fuel of trucks as they drive past me. I can also feel the fluctuation in the air temperature when I hit thermals and cool spots, and the hairs on my forearm respond as I sail down the road with my arm out the window.

I want more of that.

I want an unobstructed view of the world I’m exploring. Once I actually got a taste of what was going on above, under, and around my four-wheeled pony, it only gave me an appetite for taking in more of it.

Do you know what your car sounds like? I know the metallic rattle my engine makes when I hit exactly 50 MPH on that one specific bend in the road when I’m in fourth gear as I drive home. I also know that when I rev it up a bit, that annoying rattle goes away once I hit exactly 54 MPH.

How could I ever know this in a Honda Civic with my little piano music playing on my iPod and the air conditioner chugging away, trying to keep me cool?

I can’t. It just doesn’t work that way. I like being attuned to those little environmental factors that are always there whether we realize them or not.

And for whatever reason, the closer I get to turning 40, the more I crave those raw, visceral sounds and feelings of life. I don’t mind my face turning red because I forgot to put on sunscreen while driving up and down the s-curves of Mount Lemmon.

Who cares?

I got to feel the air change and become drastically cooler as I climbed from 2,000 to 7,000 feet in elevation while hearing the birds sing, smelling the oil spills on the road, and feeling the tingle of those UV rays pounding down on my neck as I raced away from the sun while it set!

That makes me feel alive… and I am really in the mood to feel alive right now.

I think that’s why I want to ride the simplest, purest mode of mechanized transportation out there. I want to take it all in. Bring on the two-wheeled cruisers!

So, as of today, I’m all done with my safety course, and my license is good until I’m 65.

The overall experience of learning to ride a motorcycle was very interesting… and I have to say, it was harder than I expected.

I don’t mean that in the way most people mean it when they say, “It was harder than I expected.” I’m constantly surprised when people say that because it tells me they’re really bad at understanding or predicting how hard things are.

A few of my kids are like this: God love ‘em, but they’re regularly shocked when they try new things and it turns out to be difficult. One of my sons was nearly histrionic due to his inability to ride a bicycle.

Apparently, he thought he’d just hop on it for the very first time and ride off into the sunset. I was sad for him, but I also thought it was kind of hilarious: why would he think that balancing on two wheels while moving forward—something he’d never done before in his life—would be so simple?

In the case of learning to ride a motorcycle, I was a bit surprised by what, exactly, turned out to be so challenging.

Riding a motorcycle on a road filled with cars presents you with tremendous threats that are constantly changing, for example. You are always in danger, if not due to your own mistakes in speed and maneuvering, then due to the actions of others on the road.

I won’t even bore you here with listing the unbelievable number of things you need to be observing, anticipating, thinking about, and preparing for while riding down the road on a bike… but I will share a few things I learned in this course that were very interesting.

It was way harder than I expected.

Okay, that’s not actually true. Like I said, I expected it to be hard. But the riding part was more challenging than I was prepared for in a few ways.

I was totally prepared to do a very bad job and forget lots of things or do them the wrong way, over and over until I eventually got them right. And that is exactly what happened, but some of the things I thought would be hard weren’t.

Some of the things that turned out to be hard were things I didn’t even know about at all before I started.

Shifting was really tricky.

In general, I’m not afraid of shifting. I’ve driven a car with a manual transmission for most of my life: I have always preferred a manual gearbox, in fact.

In a car, though, you have a stick shift in your center console with numbers on it, and you can literally just look down at it and immediately know what gear you’re in. But as I learned today, shifting on a manual motorcycle is totally different.

At least on the bike I used (a Suzuki TU250X), I had to stomp down on a peg on the left side of the bike to shift down and pull the peg up with my toe to shift up.

How do you know which gear you’re in? You don’t! It doesn’t tell you.

You simply have to remember the whole time what gear you’re in, and if you forget, you have to st