Will and I went to Parent/Teacher conferences at the high school this afternoon. Not much to report there. We got in and out and on our way in just a little over an hour. I was starving, so I decided we needed a Wendy's pit stop. On our way there, Will made a comment that was the genesis of this post.
"I don't really like driving." he said.
He went on to explain that he thought driving was a pretty poorly laid out means of transportation, with a high level of risk and too many opportunities for a bad ending. The fact is that two massive metal contraptions pass within feet of one another at high rates of speed, filled with strangers who are trusting one another to not zig when they are supposed to zag.
I completely understand where my son is coming from on this, because I have always felt the same way. I had a really hard time coming to terms with driving when I was a teen. In fact, I didn't get my driver's license until I was 18 years old for that very reason. I really didn't like driving. I wasn't a bad driver (neither is Will), I just didn't like it.
After Will said that this afternoon, I remembered a Top Gear episode Helena was watching the other day. One of the show's hosts, Jeremy Clarkson, had an opportunity to drive a specific car on a specific race track that he had already "driven" in a popular video game. He was trying to see if he could drive it just as fast in real life as he had in the game. He couldn't. His analysis of why he was unable to recreate the same track times caught my attention. He said that while he was racing around the track, his mind would suddenly think, 'what if a tire blew right .... now?' or 'what if I lost traction going around this curve?' Essentially, the whole time he was racing the car in real life, his mind was supplying him with every worst case scenario it could come up with, causing him to drive more conservatively than he had in the video game, where his brain KNEW there were no life-or-death consequences to his actions. His conclusion was that race car drivers must not have much of an imagination, or a means of shutting it off.
That's Will's and my problem. Too much imagination. Both of our brains are supplying us with an instantaneous barrage of worst case scenarios every time another car passes us while driving. It is also why I am such an absolutely ROTTEN passenger. At least when I am driving, I do have control over one aspect of the whole dodgy experience. When a passenger... I have absolutely NO CONTROL of any of the variables! My mind goes into overdrive supplying me with all sorts of not so calming assessments of what might go wrong at any given moment. Sometimes, truthfully, I just have to shut my eyes in order to remain calm while sitting in the passenger seat.
I really don't mind driving so much anymore. I was able to reassure Will that it gets better with time and experience. You learn to deaden your imagination a bit and trust the strangers around you ... sort of.
OK. Maybe not the trusting strangers part. I still expect anyone and everyone around me to pull a stupid stunt with their vehicle...
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