This book is sometimes found in one of: Biography, Philosophy, Self-help, New-Age (though published in 1974), or unclassified nonfiction. When I went to school at CU in Boulder, you had to have read this or you were just not hip.

This guy and his son are out on a cross-country motorcycle trip. The guy is really into understanding why everything is, and how and why he and others value everything they see and do. He quietly yet compellingly talks of simple things as simple things, yet seems to lay great import on them. He uses the motorcycle's state and maintainance along the way as metaphor for all sorts of life situations: care for the machine: it works; disregard or abuse it: it fails. Etc.

This book is 25% tale, 75% analysis. It's very interesting, but for some reason I never went back to reread even parts of it, and I never tried to follow up with similar works. Maybe it's a bit too new-age for me. Even so, it's far less self-serving than other stuff I've seen in the genre.