Drive and Thrive (lesson 2)

At 10 o’clock this morning I took the Kimball bus six blocks to the Nova Driving School and Carlos, the self-proclaimed best driving instructor in Chicago. It was our second lesson. Carlos is indeed a good teacher, but he gets impatient with my jerky turns, breaks and starts. He also was not impressed with my sometimes lapses from “my best friend,” the yellow line in the center of the road. At one point, in the middle of the two-hour lesson, I wondered if he would stress me out so much that I would ask to cancel my two remaining lessons. By the end, we were friends again, and I had learned to make a slight but palpable breeze with the wheel and the pedals.

Fast learning is exciting, but it quickly brings out any resistance to the subject matter and/or the method of delivery. I have some of both here, because Carlos can be demeaning (de-meaning, what an interesting word) which strikes on old demons, and learning to drive is freeing in a surprisingly intimidating way. For me, that is. There is freedom in confinement, or at least a structure of resistance to fall back on.

I'm more concerned with learning to fly than to drive, and I may have held fear of being grounded by a car. This time I'm learning how driving and flying are similar. They're both about directing what's yours to direct, and trusting what's not. They both involve words starting with "trans." By the way, when I say flying, I'm not talking about piloting an airplane.

During my summer after my junior year of college, I performed a solo puppet show in Washington Square in New York City. I wouldn’t call the show a success, but the few people who saw it were generally encouraging. An unshaven, possibly drunk man told me I had “thrive… drive… drive AND thrive.”

I’m figuring it out. How to drive. How to thrive.