My dad insisted that I learn to drive on a manual transmission vehicle, aka “stick shift.” There were a couple of reasons he cited for his position on this: 1. “If you can drive stick, you can drive anything, and 2. “The driver is much more involved with the driving process when they’re driving manual.”
And so I lurched his Subaru XT around the empty parking lot of the local elementary school until I learned the timing of the clutch-to-accelerator transition, a particularly challenging task when combined with his teaching me how to parallel park. Of course just because I knew how to “drive stick” didn’t make me a better driver. Once when I still only had my learner’s permit I ended up on a slight incline, waiting to turn onto a very busy street, when a police car lined up right behind me to make the same turn. I was sweating as I held down the clutch and the brake awaiting the moment when I would have to move my foot over to the accelerator, opening up the very likely possibility of rolling back and hitting the cop behind me. In my angst I overcorrected to avoid this and ended up peeling out, “burning rubber,” as my dad would say, and frenetically glancing in the rearview mirror for the next several miles as I waited for the cop to pull me over. My dad was laughing hysterically.
Then there was the time my dad placed way too much confidence in me and suggested I practice backing out of our garage by myself. There was a curve to our driveway that required a subtle turn of the steering wheel, once the car was completely out of the garage, to avoid backing into the railroad-tie barrier that separated the driveway from the landscaping. Two sections of that last sentence held the key to success–”subtle turn” and “once the car was completely out of the garage.” As my dad headed to the backyard to work on his garden I sat in the car and started to do all of the things I was supposed to before backing up–I checked my mirrors, rearview and both sides, held the clutch and brake down to start the car, pushed the stick shift down and over to the “R,” and slowly coordinated the pedals to release the clutch and and gently move my right food from the brake to the gas pedal. I had that part down pretty well by this point, but for some reason my brain skipped the crucial parts of the instructions detailed above. As I started to back out of the garage I pulled the steering wheel as far as I could to the left, without waiting until I was completely out of the garage, and smashed the front right fender into the frame of the garage door, creating a huge dent. I freaked out immediately but had the wherewithal to throw the car in neutral and pull the emergency brake before leaping out of the driver’s seat and running inside our house, crying all the way to my bedroom where I promptly slumped onto the floor, sobbing. My mom followed me, not knowing what happened or even what I had been doing. Through tears I told her I smashed the car into the garage. She left to find my dad in the backyard and a few minutes later he came up the stairs. He told me, “This is not a big deal. It’s just a car. The important thing right now is that you get back down there and try again so that you’re not afraid.” I shook my head vigorously and rejected this idea saying, “I’m never driving again!” But he persisted with his encouragement and walked me back down the stairs, sending me off to the garage while he returned to his gardening. I brushed off the tears but was still making those heaving-cry-breathing jerky movements, not so dissimilar to the jumpy movements I made the car do when first learning how to drive stick in that empty parking lot. I settled into the driver’s seat, determined not to make the same mistake again. And technically I didn’t make the SAME mistake…I just turned the wheel to the opposite side this time as I backed out and slammed the left fender into the garage frame. Matching dents, matching tears, matching promise to never drive again…different response from my dad this time. “I think it’s time to take a break from driving practice today.”
There are several lessons I could write about related to this anecdote, but I really just want to highlight the importance of learning to drive stickshift versus automatic as it relates to our thoughts (the misadventures of my teenage driving experience were really just a bonus comic relief).
The point my dad made about the driver being more part of the process when driving a manual transmission translates nicely to how I believe we should be processing information in today’s world. A car with automatic transmission does all of the fine-tuning for you, basically giving the driver only two ways to control the car’s movement–with the accelerator or the brake. With a manual transmission you can engage the different gears as the situations change. When you want to slow down, rather than hit the brake you can downshift, which is a much smoother way to transition from a high speed to a low speed. In dangerous conditions like icy roads, this approach could save you from skidding out, as it is a much more gentle way to bring the car down in speed. Using the stick shift also makes the car more efficient in terms of fuel utilization, and it can extend the longevity of the brakes and general wear and tear on the car. Let’s see if I can really beat this metaphor to death in the following paragraphs (like I beat up my dad’s car…).
We are inundated with information from various communication channels every day, and each channel is serving its own needs in the way it presents that information. There are “clickbait” titles on the internet posing provocative news headlines that end up being completely misleading, political commentaries with self-serving spins on information that oppose factual reporting and instead impart subjective rhetoric that then finds its way into our belief system. If we don’t know how to manually shift our thoughts to assess what we are seeing, hearing and digesting from these various sources, if we just run on automatic and allow other “authorities” to take over control of our thoughts, we lose connection with our values and beliefs and end up with only two choices: accelerate or brake, rather than play an active participant in scrutinizing information being fed to us.
We can practice exerting more control over our responses to information with easy examples before getting into the more complex ideas. One day this past fall I woke up to see snow falling outside. It was the first snowfall of the “season,” but a bit too early for my taste, as it wasn’t even winter yet. My gut reaction was to say out loud, “for f**k’s sake!” I then took a short video of the snow falling and was about to send it to my husband, who was in California at the time, with an eye roll emoji to demonstrate my annoyance. But just before I selected that emoji I paused and asked myself, “what if I viewed this event as a beautiful change of season, a peaceful throw of frozen confetti by Mother Nature, instead of deciding that this scene before me meant more cold, dark, slippery, prohibitive weather that would keep us all in shut up inside for the next 3 months?” In this moment I forced myself to choose a different approach. I downshifted rather than slam on the brakes. I “tried on” the excitement of a child, to whom snowfall is magical and equates to play, activity, a pause in daily routine, maybe a day at home with their mom or dad eating soup and grilled cheese and drinking hot chocolate with marshmallows, taking a hike or sledding, catching the snowflakes on their tongue! I sent the video of the snowfall with a snowflake emoji, a happy snowman, and skis. My husband responded with a bitmoji of him looking out the door over huge snowdrifts with a grumpy expression on his face. Ha! We are so conditioned to our ingrained beliefs and influences. The weather people spout doom and gloom when snow is in the forecast. What if, when announcing snow in the forecast, instead of describing the impending traffic accidents, warning against heart attacks from shoveling and predicting electrical outages, the meteorologists said, “Hey everyone, great news! There’s snow in the forecast for tomorrow! We get to witness the beautiful frozen crystal precipitation that drapes a blanket of icing sugar on these bare trees who have been dying for a “blanket” ever since the loss of their insulating leaves this past fall! Not only that, there may be enough snow to break out your cross-country skis or get that perfect instagram photo with the red barn, sleek brown horse and sparkling white carpet rolling across the hillside of a quintessential New England town!” But instead we get dread, fear, warnings, and if we are in automatic mode we just absorb it, repeat it, and spread it to others without even thinking. When applied to more serious types of (mis)information, this can be a very dangerous pattern that keeps us all paralyzed by fear and unable to shift our perspective.
It is easy for us to get into a pattern of rote responses instead of critically examining the information we receive and choosing our own way of responding to it. It can be difficult to reject the consensus, especially when we consider those delivering information as “authorities,” but it is our job to ask questions of ourselves, of those we respect and trust, and to formulate a narrative that supports our ability to maintain a balance between preparedness and continued growth and forward movement.
COVID and the isolation that accompanied it brought two paths: regression or progression, depending on how we used the time and how we responded to one of the greatest challenges many of us have encountered in our lifetimes. How did you handle the quarantine? Did you see it as an opportunity at all? What did you do with your time? Doom scroll? Drink more alcohol because at least the liquor stores were open? Was ANYONE in a position of authority talking about the potential of this situation and what we could learn from it? Was anyone talking about how to endure and keep moving forward despite the tremendous obstacles we were facing? I don’t recall anyone leading that way. Instead they just created a mountain of fear that kept most people from continuing to grow during that time period and beyond. Those who took advantage of the great pause may have chosen to do things like initiate a meditation practice, or get out on the nature trails near their homes, trails that they’d never stepped foot on previously. Of course this was a stressful time, but with an appropriate set of gears one could choose when to speed up, when to slow down, when to take risks and when to drive more conservatively. Unfortunately the majority of people stayed on automatic, watching the news and not thinking about what we were all supposed to learn from this time period and how we could use it to be BETTER.
What if we looked at these challenging situations with at least curiosity (“I wonder how this will play out…”) and at best as an opportunity to flex our resiliency and fortitude? In order to shift our mindset away from what is fed to us (automatic) and towards a more personalized interpretation of information (manual), it is important to surround ourselves with people who are open-minded and curious, who ask questions and challenge assumptions, and who encourage us to think for ourselves rather than digest something being fed to us by sources who have ulterior motives. The media, in particular, is incentivized to control our reactions and trap us in a fear cycle that feeds their purpose and what they are rewarded for: reactions, clicks, audience numbers, voters, etc.
I bet everyone can come up with multiple examples of negative experiences during the pandemic. Not only did we have our own, but we were fed negative stories daily. But try answering this question for yourself: can you think of one positive thing that came out of the pandemic experience for you? Try this with any so-called “negative” experience in your life. Can you find one thing, one lesson, that helped you grow?
We can either be passive recipients of information and automatically accept the spin that is placed on that information by the source benefitting from that spin, or we can choose our own perspective, one that puts us in the driver’s seat of a manual vehicle with options for how we handle the obstacles, weather conditions, bumps, curves and detours thrown at us.
Driving an automatic is easy. You don’t have to think much. But is that really how we were meant to drive through this world? There was a third reason my dad cited for why he wanted me to learn to drive on a manual–it’s a lot more FUN!