Drive More

We drove 12 hours today to spend the week with family. Could have flown but in recent years the pros column for driving vs flying has far outweighed the cons. I've never liked flying from a pure fear perspective. Yes I know the statistics, but in my experience statistics are cold comfort. Add to that the time-consuming security protocols and limited ability to bring things, and the favorability shifts.

I'm not saying I'm going to drive onto a ship to cross the Atlantic. Some things are best done by flight. But trips to various parts of the contiguous states are very doable in a car. And if you have a bigger car, you can carry things you love and you can bring your dog. Dogs are family.

I've also come to appreciate some other less-obvious benefits of driving. We are always in a rush these days and everyone seems to be looking for more time for solitude and reflection. We want the fleeting moments between meetings and obligations to be less fleeting. We want time for free thought and creativity.

We also seem to be more divided as a country, in some part because we can simply avoid parts of the country that make us uncomfortable by flying over them. That's a bit of a loaded statement but I think its true. A widening idelogical divide is in part supported by a lack of interaction. Money and technology make it easy for us to avoid a certain kind of self-work that isn't directly tied to a paycheck but may be good for us and for our country.

Driving gives you all of these things. You have hours to think with a changing landscape providing input to stoke your creativity. As long as you're not in a Tesla, you can't access your devices so your mind is free to meander. And at a minimum you interact with people along the way, at gas stations and restaurants. You're not building deep relationships but you are at least exposed to people you would normally never encounter. You might receive a kindness that changes how you feel about something. You might provide a kindness that changes how someone else might feel about something.

I've hated driving for most of my life; a consequence of growing up being a backseat hostage to parents who used to drive across the country to visit family before the time of ipads or portable video games. But I've come around a lot over the past few years. There is a timelessness to driving; it is the closest thing to how people experienced the world before you could fly.

There is beauty in the journey.  As much as I love technology and am an early adopter of most everything new, I yearn to be connected to real things and to the land beneath my feet.