Finding out what it means to be human - on a motorbike

Dr Lindsay Foreman, who has lived in the south of Spain since 2019, is travelling around the world with her husband, gathering research to present at a psychology conference

Jennie Rhodes

Granada

Friday, 20 December 2024, 18:20

Dr Lindsay Foreman is a woman on a mission, in fact she's a woman on two missions: one is to get over her fear of motorbikes and the other is to deliver research to a positive psychology conference in Brisbane, Australia in July 2025. The research project is a follow-up to the PhD she completed last year in coaching and mentoring with Oxford Brookes University.

She presented the findings of her doctorate at the European Conference on Positive Psychology in Innsbruck, Austria, earlier this year and that's where it occurred to Lindsay, who has lived in Granada since 2019, that the questions being asked about what makes people happy are becoming ever more complicated. "The essence of being human is so much simpler than what we think - the system drives us towards materialistic things," she tells SUR in English.

Lindsay, 52, says that nobody was asking the "simple questions" about "what it means to be human", so she came up with four: What does living a good life mean to you? What intentional activity has made the greatest impact on your life? What intentional activity do you think would make the biggest impact on your community? She then asks her participants to give a "one line message of hope for the world".

She and her husband Craig have now embarked on a journey by motorbike to ask these questions to people face to face in a number of countries between the UK and Australia.

She is asking people of all ages, "from six to 86", and from all backgrounds these four questions. "Society sells us this materialistic idea of what makes people happy - a bigger house, a bigger car, fancy holidays, but what I'm finding is that it's nature, families, connections that is what it really means to be human," she says.

The couple left their home in Granada on 29 October for the next leg of the research trip, as Lindsay had already clocked up 10,000 kilometres through the UK, Belgium, France, Switzerland, Spain and Portugal.

They took a ferry to Italy and then onto Albania and Greece, where Lindsay had interviews set up. When SUR in English caught up with her, she and Craig were just about to leave Europe for Turkey, from where they were expecting both the journey and gathering data to become "much more difficult".

The contacts she had until then had come through people she knows in Spain - she points out that Costa Women has been a great help - or from the conference in Innsbruck. In fact she even received a message on social media from the mayor of Brussels who took part in her research and gave her a "diplomatic contact in Iran".

Logistical planning has been difficult. "I don't want to avoid the countries that are difficult. It matters to me that we find a way to get there to speak to the invisible people," she explains.

She is also combining the trip with her coaching and leadership work in the UK which means flying back to Europe from time to time. Lindsay explains that they "typically find kind friends and contacts" who look after the bikes for them.

Both Lindsay and Craig only passed their motorbike tests in summer this year. For Lindsay it was a "personal challenge to overcome" a fear of the vehicles ever since her brother was killed in a motorbike accident.

A big skier, Lindsay chose to live in Granada to be near the Sierra Nevada and its ski resorts. It was her father, very ill with cancer at the time, who had given her the final encouragement to do the motorbike test. "He told me to do it and said that riding a motorbike was like skiing," explains Lindsay, adding, "and he was right. The gear you have to wear to do it, that sense of adrenaline and being exposed to the elements. It's the same."

Lindsay uploads all the videos of her interviews onto her YouTube channel and Facebook page and says that they are already having an impact. In fact one of the first interviews she did was with a man who had decided he was going to set up men's meet-ups "and that is now happening" says Lindsay,

Eventually, she wants to make sure that the results of her work are accessible to people so that they have "a real impact" on people's lives. That might be in the form of a book or continuing to present it to experts in psychology. To follow Lindsay and Craig's progress follow them on Facebook: PPK2K RTW Motorcycle Mission.

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