How To Drive A Car
On Forest Trails and Tiny Elves and the Folly of 'Thinking the Best'
Last week I attended my two-year-old son’s Christmas Concert. ‘Concert’ is a generous term here, since some of the performers can barely walk, plenty can’t yet form coherent sentences, and, while many can sing, there’s nobody you’d exactly call a musician, but we’ll allow it regardless – a concert it is.
This was my second of these concerts, and it’s always great fun. The nursery takes over a nearby sports hall for the afternoon, and they deck the hall with, not quite boughs of holly, but with Christmas trees and cotton wool snow, and dazzling quantities of fairy lights. The children and staff alike don their Christmas outfits, and the staff do their utmost to remind the children of the words and actions to songs they’ve spent weeks rehearsing. In that sense, you could technically call it a failure, since few of the children show signs of having rehearsed anything, and instead spend their time happily bemused at the spectacle of it all, just generally delighted to be dressed up as elves and Santas, watching the crowds for their parents. In one narrow sense then, a failure; in every other sense, utterly joyous.
Afterwards, the staff turn on the main lights and begin the process of clearing away the decorations. They leave gym mats out for the children to play on, and provide alcohol and nibbles for the parents. A particular kind of chaos ensues.
There are children so young they can’t yet walk, and children whose enthusiasm for walking doesn’t quite match up to their actual ability. There are more experienced walkers who delight in demonstrating their unique brand of Runscreaming™ around the hall, and older siblings playing football with baubles. There’s an occasional hobbling grandparent, and then there are the parents themselves trying to prevent catastrophes with a drink in one hand and a mince pie in the other. To borrow a line from Neil Hannon: all human life is here.
Some here are steady, others erratic, some are fast while others are slow, and the speed at which a person moves does not necessarily dictate their temperament – fast movers might be steady, and the slow may be erratic. You need your wits about you to navigate an environment like this.
Surprisingly, despite the constant apologies and narrowly averted disasters, everyone is in good spirits. Maybe it’s the shared experience of raising a child – a collective eye-roll for the young – or maybe it’s just the free prosecco. Either way, there is no trace of anger in this hall. We all know what the deal is and we’d be fools to presume otherwise.
And this is how I’ve started thinking about driving a car. I’m aware that’s a bit of a leap from a toddlers’ Christmas Concert, but bear with me. We’ll detour and come back.
Anger wants somewhere to go. If I bang my head on a cupboard door someone else left open, that’s ideal because I have somewhere to direct my rage. I love nothing more than blaming my wife when things like this happen, no matter how tenuous the fault. ‘Did you leave this cupboard door open‽’ – lovely bit of blame. It’s me who’s the victim, my wife who’s the issue, and my world view remains comfortably intact. Perfect. If, however, I bang my head on a cupboard door that I left open, then that’s a struggle. The anger can’t really go anywhere – and heaven forbid I’m just a clutz – so it’s a more difficult experience to process because, in general, whenever life is frustrating, notice how the problem is always the same: other people.
That’s why it’s emotionally challenging to drive a car on busy roads. You’re a pretty good driver, if you do say so yourself. The problem is all the other drivers. Or, as George Carlin invited us to notice, anyone driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone driving faster than you is a maniac. All of which is to say, there’s no shortage of outlets for your anger on the roads: fools abound.
But this is what it means to drive. There are those who block the way and prevent you from driving at a reasonable speed, and then there are those who recklessly overtake because you’re so unbearably slow. And how do we react to situations like these? Anger and judgment – it’s there in a flash: ‘What kind of cretin could drive like that?’ If we manage to overtake said cretin on the motorway, it becomes incredibly important that we see their face – a deep need to confirm our judgement of this person. Ah yes, we think as we glance their way, truly the face of a dickhead.
And somehow all of this is a shock to us, as if we expected the perfect journey, as if, on some level, we believe everyone else should drive exactly as we expect them to. But we’ve been around. We shouldn’t be surprised when we encounter these hazards, because we are navigating an environment defined by them. And that’s where the Christmas Concert comes in. We all know what the deal is and we’d be fools to presume otherwise. As in that sports hall, so too on the roads: all human life is here. There are kids not yet twenty, so young they’re invincible, and drivers so old they’re no longer safe.
This is not, I should clarify, an invitation to think more compassionately of other drivers, though you’re welcome to. I used to ‘think the best’ of those who drove dangerously: maybe it’s an emergency, maybe they’re on their way to the hospital. Or maybe they’ve just passed their test and they’re still a little bit anxious. It’s a preferable response, for sure, since compassion tends to negate the nastier impulse to judge, but the issue, I find, is that it takes a lot of energy to fight against your natural emotional response, and I’m not convinced you’re really fooling anybody when you try to. The kindness of ‘maybe it’s an emergency’ is really just covering up the fury of ‘what an absolute twat’ – it’s anger wearing glasses and a bad fake moustache.
Instead, I’ve been finding it helpful to frame the whole experience as simply an environment to navigate. What does that mean? Well, if I’m hiking through the forest, I’m looking out for roots I may trip over, branches I must duck under, patches of mud I might slip on. Of course I’m looking out for these things, and it’s not a big deal when I encounter them: it’s the nature of the trail. Or say I’m playing a video game. I don’t expect to reach the end of a mission without encountering obstacles – that’s the whole point of the game. Or, if I’m mingling after my son’s Christmas Concert, I’m alert to the very real possibility of a tiny elf running into my shins. There’s no judgement involved in any of these scenarios. I’m just reacting to the situation as best I can.
So what’s the difference here? Why are we fine slowing down to navigate a tricky patch of woodland footpath, yet so angry applying the brakes for the car in front? There are, of course, clear and easy targets for our anger on the roads – other humans to get upset with – and, to any sane person at least, a protruding forest root can never truly be a moron. And that, I think, gets us closer to something a little bit deeper.
The event and its cause are not the same thing.
We conflate the two because they’re so closely related, but having to unexpectedly apply the brakes when I’m driving (the event – the quantifiable impact on my life) is not the same thing as the driver in front signalling late (the cause – that which necessitated my response). In spite of the causality, they are distinct occurrences. I’m not really upset about having to break – that’s not a big deal – I’m annoyed with the driver in front. Or rather, I’m not angry at the event itself, I’m angry at its cause.
We have a tendency, I think, to direct anger at causes more than the events themselves. That’s why I’m never going to get upset at a protruding forest root, even if I trip over it – there’s no clear cause for the root having grown in the way it did. The tree just exists. It’s part of the environment. That’s all.
I get angry when I hit my head on a cupboard door because some part of me believes it shouldn’t be part of my environment, and I should exist in a world where the cupboard door is always safely closed. But if I expect to bang my head on a cupboard door say once a year, then its occurrence is softened on account of it being just my annual head bang.
Seneca called this premeditatio malorum – the premeditation of evils. It’s the act of contemplating adversity in advance, with the aim of better equipping us to deal with frustrations when they arise, and I think it’s also worthwhile estimating their frequency too. I might own a favourite mug, on average, for seven years before it chips or breaks. I’ll lose my phone, or have it stolen, once every ten or fifteen years, perhaps. On my local roads, I can expect to encounter approximately one dangerous driving manoeuvre for every half-an-hour driving. When I set off on my journey, I may not know when I will encounter this danger, but if I know it’s out there somewhere, I’m not as upset when I inevitably find it.
I’m still working on this, mind you. If I’m out walking with my son and a car screeches around a residential corner at a speed that would kill him, the anger is still there – I can’t stop it. Similarly, if you’re ever involved in a car accident, that’s just plain scary – all bets are off and you’ll react how you will. But these are, I hope, exceptions.
So this is how I drive a car – or try to, at least. It’s an environment to navigate. Pedestrians may act like the roads are for them, and cyclists may cycle as if daring cars to hit them, but these hazards are no different from the protruding root on the forest trail: they just exist. That’s all. Bad drivers are not driving badly at me; they are out there already, driving badly whether I’m there or not. And if I can hang onto that, if I can remember the nature of the environment, and if I can react to the event rather than its cause, then I find the anger evaporates. I feel no need to get upset, nor to fake kind responses. I can let go of judgment altogether and move on without wasting silly amounts of energy on strangers I’ll forget in five minutes’ time.
And, for what it’s worth, this way of thinking can also be useful in navigating the heavily crowded aisles of a peak-time Tesco supermarket.