170 lines
8.9 KiB
Plaintext
170 lines
8.9 KiB
Plaintext
[1] ←Home [2]Archive [3]Tags [4]About
|
||
|
||
Daily notes for 2023-07-17
|
||
|
||
Jul 17, 2023 · 1447 words · 7 minute read
|
||
Table of Contents
|
||
|
||
• [5]Notes on conflict
|
||
• [6]The INT650
|
||
|
||
Notes on conflict [7]🔗
|
||
|
||
When my master and I were walking in the rain, he would say, “Do not walk
|
||
so fast, the rain is everywhere.”
|
||
—Shunryu Suzuki
|
||
|
||
For a very long time — too much of my life — I thought conflict was a sign that
|
||
there was a problem. I didn’t like disagreeing with people about much of
|
||
anything. I’m using “conflict” in a broad sense: Over resources, points of
|
||
view, vision, beliefs, tastes.
|
||
|
||
Over time I shifted on the matter a little, but when I look back on it I
|
||
realize I wasn’t really evolving my attitude toward conflict, I was just
|
||
evolving my response to its existence, while still believing that being in a
|
||
state of conflict is a problem. I just got better at keeping my blood pressure
|
||
low and gritting through it. I think I was looking at conflict as a thing that
|
||
you have to acknowledge exists, but that you need to get through as quickly as
|
||
possible, because it’s a bad place to be.
|
||
|
||
That attitude created some problems:
|
||
|
||
• When you’re bad at being in conflict, you’re at a disadvantage with people
|
||
who are good at it and mean you harm; and you’re annoying people who are
|
||
good at it and mean you no harm.
|
||
• When you look at conflict as a thing to grit through and end quickly it’s
|
||
hard to maintain your integrity. (See above: The people who don’t want
|
||
what’s best for you (or the business, or the world, or etc.) understand
|
||
this, and the ones who are really good at it and a little indifferent
|
||
toward what’s best for you are counting on you to do all the work to get
|
||
out of conflict.)
|
||
• When you’d rather do anything than admit that you’re in a state of
|
||
conflict, you will eventually do something about your problem that is less
|
||
skillful for having waited than if you’d admitted it to yourself (and
|
||
whoever you’re in conflict with) sooner. Or, as one of my past managers put
|
||
it to me, “don’t be that guy who hockey-sticks.” (I nodded then kind of
|
||
hockey-sticked.)
|
||
• When you’re bad at being in conflict, and you’re willing to be set aside
|
||
your integrity or do other things to get out of it quickly, you’ll
|
||
eventually get tired of “losing” and figure out ways to “win” that cause
|
||
others to see you as, at best, baffling and frustrating, and at worst
|
||
Machiavellian and treacherous.
|
||
|
||
That, anyhow, is a rough categorization of my many hundreds of mishandlings of
|
||
conflict. Maybe the most interesting thing to me about all those mishandlings
|
||
is that over time I managed to convince myself that failing to be in conflict
|
||
well was a sign of virtue. Moral sophistication. “Taking the high road.” “Not
|
||
worth the stress.” “Learning how to play the game.” “Protecting the team.”
|
||
|
||
Over the past few years, I’ve changed on the matter: On balance, I definitely
|
||
don’t think its existence is a sign there’s a problem. It’s just a sign that
|
||
there’s a conflict.
|
||
|
||
I still feel a little cautious about conflict when I don’t know the person I’m
|
||
in conflict with very well. Caution is useful, because people who are bad at
|
||
being in conflict but mean well — people who are “good eggs” — can still sort
|
||
of mess things up, because if I have to bet on whether someone hates “losing”
|
||
or just grinning and bearing it more, my money is on them hating losing more.
|
||
When things get to a place where it feels existential to them, even good eggs
|
||
can act sort of rotten. So you have to take time and attend to the interaction
|
||
so they can be in conflict and feel safe about it.
|
||
|
||
I still think I have a responsibility to introduce the existence of conflict
|
||
with kindness, or receive the news that I’ve entered into a state of conflict
|
||
in a manner that invites a full airing. “Relaxed and possibly delighted
|
||
curiosity,” I suppose I’d call it, rather than a furrowing of the brow and
|
||
assurances that I want to restore harmony at once. Because I don’t want to
|
||
restore harmony at once. I want to understand why we want different things,
|
||
then figure out how we can both behave with integrity while we sort that out.
|
||
|
||
The INT650 [8]🔗
|
||
|
||
[f4d4087a00284d89b3cedd2720a3b117]
|
||
|
||
I finally quit waffling on what to do with the Royal Enfield Himalayan. I took
|
||
it up to [9]Sabatino Moto in St. Johns and traded it in for another Royal
|
||
Enfield: An INT650 (“Interceptor” everywhere else in the world, but not in
|
||
North America where Honda owns the rights to the name.)
|
||
|
||
It’s a pretty night and day difference. The Himalayan is a mountain goat, and
|
||
the INT650 is … something a little prettier and a little less rough. I was
|
||
never going to ride the Himalayan the way it was meant to be ridden — fire
|
||
roads, gravel, dirt — and I didn’t have the patience for the very “work in
|
||
progress” attitude Royal Enfield took toward it. One thing you learn from all
|
||
the Himalayan videos on YouTube is that the people who love them best don’t
|
||
mind fiddling, tweaking, and wrenching. After reading hundreds of owners talk
|
||
about their experiences, I have come to realize I lost the factory QA lottery
|
||
on mine, and that engendered a lack of confidence in it that I never recovered
|
||
from.
|
||
|
||
Also turns out, I think, that I had a bad dealer:
|
||
|
||
The first RE dealer in the Portland area doesn’t really want to sell them, and
|
||
it really does not want to do anything other than the most basic service. I
|
||
think I’ve documented that elsewhere, so I won’t go into it more here, but I’ll
|
||
just offer the observation that RE’s strategy of linking up with Harley dealers
|
||
to build out its US distribution network did its customers no favors.
|
||
|
||
The folks at Sabatino, on the other hand, seem to have a genuine appreciation
|
||
for the bikes, that extends all the way to acknowledging that RE has some QA
|
||
challenges. Sabatino addresses that by doing their own QA when they uncrate a
|
||
new bike. And they’re willing to talk about the ups and downs of each model. My
|
||
head was briefly turned by another model, and I got a reasoned, balanced,
|
||
discussion of why maybe that one wouldn’t work for me.
|
||
|
||
They also offer test rides. I can name one dealership that grudgingly made me
|
||
sign a waiver and write a check for the full amount to test ride a Grom for
|
||
five laps around their parking lot, and they only did that because it was a
|
||
two-year-old model and they’d sold the newer one they promised me out from
|
||
under me. Sabatino made me do the waiver, share my insurance information, and
|
||
hand over my license, but then they tossed me the keys and told me they’d see
|
||
me when they saw me.
|
||
|
||
Anyhow, the test ride sold me. I’ve been through several configurations of
|
||
motorcycle and scooter since getting my motorcycle endorsement — maxiscoots,
|
||
normal scoots, mini-moto, cruiser, trail bike, dual-sport — and none of them
|
||
have been the thing I first imagined myself riding when I finally decided to
|
||
learn how to ride. Well, learn how to ride as an adult, anyhow. The twin 650
|
||
runs and sounds nice, the bike handles more comfortably than the Himalayan
|
||
despite there being 40 pounds more of it, and the super-simple analog speedo
|
||
and tach are just sort of pleasant. I ran it around St. Johns for a while, was
|
||
struck by how immediately comfortable it was (and how confident I felt on it),
|
||
and that was that.
|
||
|
||
Yesterday I took it on a ride out Foster Road toward Damascus. There’s a side
|
||
road I head out onto that eventually rejoins on the other side of Damascus,
|
||
close to a back road that joins the highway down to Estacada. So I headed out
|
||
past Estacada, to see how it did on a small back highway. There was a little
|
||
bit of buffeting — no fairings — but it ran and handled well. I felt more
|
||
confident on the little back roads coming back than I did heading out as I got
|
||
to know the bike better. I did decide to detract from its vintage purity a
|
||
little by ordering a Dart flyscreen when I got back: People say it helps clean
|
||
up the turbulence at highway speeds, and keeps the bugs off the pretty silver
|
||
cans.
|
||
|
||
Anyhow, glad I’ve got it in the driveway with so much of the riding season
|
||
left, and I can wholeheartedly recommend Sabatino Moto if you’re looking to buy
|
||
one for yourself.
|
||
|
||
[10]journal [11]conflict
|
||
[12] Created with Sketch.
|
||
© Copyright 2024 mph
|
||
Powered by [13]Hugo Theme By [14]nodejh
|
||
|
||
References:
|
||
|
||
[1] https://mike.puddingtime.org/
|
||
[2] https://mike.puddingtime.org/posts
|
||
[3] https://mike.puddingtime.org/tags
|
||
[4] https://mike.puddingtime.org/about
|
||
[5] https://mike.puddingtime.org/posts/2023-07-17-daily-notes/#notes-on-conflict
|
||
[6] https://mike.puddingtime.org/posts/2023-07-17-daily-notes/#the-int650
|
||
[7] https://mike.puddingtime.org/posts/2023-07-17-daily-notes/#notes-on-conflict
|
||
[8] https://mike.puddingtime.org/posts/2023-07-17-daily-notes/#the-int650
|
||
[9] https://www.sabatinomoto.com/
|
||
[10] https://mike.puddingtime.org/tags/journal
|
||
[11] https://mike.puddingtime.org/tags/conflict
|
||
[12] https://github.com/pdxmph
|
||
[13] http://www.gohugo.io/
|
||
[14] https://github.com/nodejh/hugo-theme-mini
|