The drive of our life

I love to drive. Fancy cars, Asian utilities, gas-guzzling pickups, trusty Japanese sedans, rattletraps, it doesn’t really matter. For me, few things in life can compare with the bliss of being behind the wheel, just you and your car (both A/C and music blaring), traversing stretches upon stretches of asphalt — bumps and all.

With apologies to the Great Bard, life is a road and we all play a part.

Truth to tell, for driving fanatics like me, what we do whenever we’re in the driver’s seat is the ultimate metaphor for our lives: we’re partly at work, a bit at play, in control but not quite. We’re alone — in a sense, masters of our own destinies — yet dependent on other moving creatures and objects (there’s a jerk everywhere!), sad to say. We live by the rules, sometimes not, and even when we don’t we can be forgiven for our sins one way or the other.

In the throne of our four-wheeled haven — mulling over issues as well as non-issues, people-watching, humming tunes that rhyme with our moods, cussing the errant motorist or pedestrian here and there, texting (oops!), or simply enjoying the view — we try to live the best way we know how.

A little less than a decade of driving has taught me many things and increased my years (no doubt). With apologies this time to Mr. Robert Fulghum, much of what I need to know I think I learned behind the wheel.

Don’t cut corners, keep your eye on the road, don’t panic: the swirl of emotions when you’re learning to drive reminds me of quiz bee days in grade school when you climbed up the stage feeling euphoric, awkward, and dead scared all at once. You knew somehow you had it coming, but never really knew what to expect.

Making matters worse for me was my first car, a gold Toyota station wagon bought from my father’s ransom, old as I was and none the worse for wear. With an engine that could just suddenly expire in the middle of the street, in the dead of the night, and at a time when the cell phone had yet to be invented, surely I was in for more than just Driving 101. Waggy was a lesson in patience, character, and crisis management. How’s that for starters?

Use the brakes. Novice drivers, amid their trepidation, worry most about stepping on the gas pedal and how to engage the higher gears, but a sister of mine said that to drive, all one had to know was the right time to brake. The rest was the easy part. Now I know better: in life we can just get too obsessed with getting ahead that we’re almost afraid to stop, forgetting the wonders that each timely pause can afford us.

Suspension driving is an altogether different matter. Mastering the "hanging" technique I seemed to lose all sense of confidence and independence; don’t we all when we’re on the brink of disaster and hanging on to dear life — ours or someone else’s? Although I tried as best as I could to self-learn this art, hang time left me groping for instruction from someone I could trust enough to tell me what to do without making me feel hopelessly stupid.

The key here was balance. Just enough gas, just enough clutch, and no pouncing on the brakes. A little bit more or less of pressure on the pedals than necessary and I’d slide back with the rest of the car. In life we learn that pushing or holding back too much doesn’t really get us anywhere; we could even get thrown off track. The sooner we gain a mastery of the balancing act, the better equipped we are for life’s inevitable twists and turns.

And so, by the time I could maneuver the car, negotiate even steep ascents, and manage to exit our village gates to ply the main roads, I knew I was set out for life. Welcome to the real world.

Look to your left, look to your right, look ahead, and peer at the car behind you. City driving posed a new challenge: to be constantly aware of other vehicles around me. Were they going to overtake, swerve into my lane or let me careen into theirs, stop dead in their tracks to pick up a passenger, or callously make a slalom course of the hapless highway? Ah, the frightening rat race. One can never tell friend from foe.

City driving awakened my sensibilities to some road values that most drivers have to learn the hard way: short cuts aren’t always shorter; it pays to let the other car know where you’re going; or the faster you go, the more dangerous it gets. (Unless you drive like Pocholo Ramirez and believe like he does that there is safety in going full throttle.) It’s a fact of life that the fast lane is fraught with hazards. Don’t get caught in the tailspin and end up not knowing what hit you.

I love to drive.

I love the Caltex ads and the way they sort of pose the question to all of us: what drives you? For me, driving does.

I’d like to burn rubber in every far side of the country that cars can take me to, come hell, come high water. People my age, we’d like to see Disneyland; visit the US and see what Hollywood is all about. But as for me, I dream of cruising from border to border on American pavement, without really having to know where I’m going.

I think of Paris-Dakar rallies and driving on desert dunes where racers sometimes don’t make the finish line because at some point in the race they are nowhere to be found. Alas, with my final apologies to Mr. Albert Einstein, I love to drive, but hate to arrive. As in life, what really counts is the journey. Whatever road we take, we’re all headed for one destination anyway, and ultimately, it’s our journeys that will make the difference.