In the Fantasyland area of Walt Disney parks around the world, you can’t escape the theme song “It’s a Small World (After All)”. Written by staff composers Robert and Richard Sherman it has been translated into many different languages. Even without visiting the magical world created to attract children of all ages, it’s hard to avoid the strains proclaiming, “It's a world of hopes and a world of fears.”

It’s also a shrinking world as the population continues to grow. Technology keeps making it even smaller as it is now easier than ever for people to travel to faraway lands to explore the culture of distant countries. Many of these visitors are business travelers from companies expanding into new markets opened to them by today’s global economy.

Technologies like the internet with its email and social networks have brought the world’s population closer together. Cell phones with texting and global communications keep people connected in ways never dreamed of before. 24 hour news channels bring every event happening in far corners of the globe into our living rooms.

Lucky for us we’ve got the wide open spaces of our favorite back country roads to get away from it all. Yet our world can still shrink in the relative solitude of the twisting ribbons of asphalt that we love so much. This can be even a greater crisis on the multilane highways as we ride with increased traffic using a quicker route to get to our destination.

We need to be able to see what’s going on all around us when we’re on the road. But it’s easy to get a little too close to the truck ahead of us. The slip stream behind it reduces the buffeting wind and our ride seems to smooth out. The challenge is that our world has just been reduced to the back of the truck. We are no longer able to see what the trucker is facing so it’s difficult for us to prepare for it. We must react to developing situations after the truck does.

Nobody likes it when unanticipated things happen to them and very few surprises that occur when we’re on our motorcycle are happy times. We’ve got to be prepared for the unexpected when we’re on two wheels and the best way to be ready is to see the situation developing. By recognizing the potential problem before it creates trouble for us, we can take the necessary actions to make sure it doesn’t affect us.

It’s much more difficult to make pending predicaments non-issues if we don’t see them early enough. A shrinking world limited to the back of the vehicle ahead obstructs our view of the road ahead. But we have control of this quandary by maintaining an appropriate following distance that allows us to see more of the highway before us.

The more we do to get the big picture so we can identify budding circumstances that could lead to trouble, the less likely we are to get caught up in them. By ensuring our world doesn’t get too small, we may truly find it is a world of hopes and not a world of fears.

Ride Smart! Ride Safe!