Driven to Distraction

I like recreational driving, if and when it makes economic sense to use up all that gas just for my entertainment.  I live in a place where the roads are full of curves; they go up and down and around things, like mountains, and over rivers.  A person can get used to that pace of driving; up and down, over and around. If you’re not on an interstate commuting into Downtown, driving can be soothing.  There’s a feeling of leaving everything behind, but you can always turn around and go back if you want to.

For me, driving in Florida is the opposite of restful, no offense meant to all the Floridians who are also driving around down here.  The Florida landscape is flat, which has a definitive bearing on the visual perspectives involved in driving.  I didn’t compute what such flatness meant in terms of the “vanishing point”, which Merriam-Webster says is the “point at which receding parallel lines seem to meet when represented in linear perspective”.  In other words, the flat, straight road you’re on disappears into the horizon.  Part of your brain is looking ahead wondering where the road went, and the other part is screaming about the taillights right smack in front of you.

Imagine you’re driving in heavy traffic down a six-lane road at night, which in Florida turns out to be darker than Gollum’s cave, and suddenly it’s raining.  Not just rain, but Florida rain – where the drops are as big as quarters and from the noise of the impacts, a person could be forgiven for thinking they’d entered a sudden hailstorm.  Windshield wipers can’t go fast enough to deal with the volume of water coming down at terminal velocity, and the lane markers have become illegible.  All of a sudden you realize that you can’t tell how far you might be from the car in front of you.  Hitting the brakes while driving in several inches of water is never a good idea, but sometimes it happens.  Back tires lose their grip so, not unreasonably, you slow down.  The driver behind you decides this is unacceptable and rapidly swims by on your left through what is now about six inches of standing water, sending up a wave that completely covers the left side of my car and for a moment obliterates the view through the windshield.  Breaths were held.

The Universe truly got my attention last week.  There have been a lot of moving parts involved in my current trip Down South and I’ll be the first to admit, my level of distraction goes up in parallel to the level of stress I might be experiencing at the time. However, it’s also been my experience that when a person isn’t paying attention to the Universe’s hints, the Universe takes that as a signal to be more forceful.  (“Hold my lightning.”)  Since the Universe apparently can see directly into our minds a person also has to watch what they worry about, since in my worldview thoughts have energy.  If a person puts enough energy “out there”, there’s a very good chance that whatever you’re worrying about will actually happen. We usually will blame being distracted, or maybe that vanishing point came into play.  What have I been subconsciously worrying about while driving in Florida?  Getting in a car wreck.  Guess what happened last week to set off this rambling, somewhat tetchy blog?

No, seriously, take a guess.