Slow Down.

That’s it . . . . just slow down.

OK, OK, I’ll elaborate. I lived and commuted in Detroit for a few years. I’ve been there, done that, never got the t-shirt or, amazingly, a ticket. I did have to call for bail money once but that was completely unrelated to speed. Recently, I’ve spent 300,000 or so miles on the highways and byways. Not many of them in rush hour traffic but just enough. Enough hours in traffic in different places in the world that I can tell you that Detroit Drivers are the worst. In fact, there were only three times that I experienced anything worse than Detroit; all isolated incidents. Twice in Texas with a fatal accident somewhere ahead of me. And once in New York City, I was halfway from Long Island City to the George Washington Bridge when a Yankees game let out. It wasn’t just the traffic jam, everyone in New York thinks they’re special and were fighting like lemmings to get to the front of the line. One guy got so excited, he changed lanes without looking and rammed his sexy foreign car into the dollies _underneath_ a semi trailer. Luckily, not mine.

My theory is that Detroit is the worst because, up until recently anyway, nearly everyone in town was building cars or had a link somewhere in the supply chain. Therefore, Detroiters think of cars as toys. Everybody zips along in Detroit Rush Hour – 75 mph [at least] and 8 inches apart. OK, in Winter it was only 73 mph and people are playing it safe – 9.5″ apart. Detroit Rush Hour was one of the first virtual reality arcade games. Everyone was playing. You’re watching all your mirrors and scanning the horizon, vectoring the cars around you and strategizing. Some guy is barely in front of you and you slip in right behind him. You’re running so close together, the heat from your radiator is fogging the chrome on his rear bumper.

Once we have entered the fray, we have to win. We’ll cut in and out of lanes, pass on the right, jam the gears and the gas, brake, jam, brake, jam. Hell, we’d consider passing on the shoulder if it meant getting the jump on those out-of-state-plates driving the speed limit! When the inevitable happens and we get bogged down, we are livid. DON’T THEY UNDERSTAND?!?! I’VE GOT TO GET TO . . . to where? To work? You aren’t nearly that enthusiastic about your job once you’ve made into the office parking lot.

Lets assume you have a 45 mile commute. If you drive 75 mph, it will take you 36 minutes to go 45 miles. If you drive 57 mph, it takes you a little more than 47 minutes. Is all that stress worth getting to the office 11 minutes sooner?

What about a 90 mile commute? Maybe you’re in management and you live out in some verdant, peaceful suburb. If you drive 75 mph, it will take 72 minutes. Driving 57 will stretch that to almost 95 minutes! If you’re in management, you are definitely going to tell me that those 23 minutes are valuable. Read on.

Now, some of you readers are on to me already. There is a problem in my examples, though I tried to word them carefully. The times are only valid if you could leap into your car while it was already doing 75 mph! And you’d have to average 75 mph for the entire trip. If there are more than a couple stop signs, or the inevitable traffic jam along the way, your average speed will plummet. Every time you slow down and/or stop, you are losing most of the 11 minutes you gained in the example. You’re spending lots of driving time at the same speed as someone who is only driving 57 mph on the highway. Take it from someone who gets paid by the mile, just stopping to hit the john will spoil your average speed for hours.

So, back when I thought I was done, I suggested you slow down. Not only will your fuel consumption and maintenance costs go down, you will gain an even more precious commodity. . . peace. Tranquility. You can laugh at all the stress puppies flying by you on the highway. You can smile at those slow out-of-towners. You can get to work in a decent mood and smile at your coworkers. You will become unbound. Think of smiling at the threshold of your house in the evening. Imagine hanging out with your family without that lump in your gut; without the crispy edges around your burned out life.

There is something else that happens to me regularly out here on the road. Someone will fly by me on the way. At the next stop sign, rest area or truckstop, that same vehicle is right there in front of me; just pulling into a parking space when I enter the lot. Imagine your coworkers stomping in to the building, cussing under their breath and swallowing all that pressure. If you take the slow lane, you’ll likely be sauntering in right behind them. Except you’ll be smiling, noticing that the landscape guys planted flowers. You’ll remember someone’s birthday as you walk by their desk. You’ll be happy enough to just start your day instead of heading for the coffee machine to bitch about traffic. Imagine how you’ll feel that night at home. You’ll notice how beautiful your family is, how lucky you are. You’ll be living a life instead of fuming about traffic.

So what’s it going to be? Five minutes sooner to a job you don’t really like anyway? Or the slow lane, smiles and peace? Well, no stress on the road. You’re still just a hamster in the wheel once you get to work.

Tags: On The Road, Think and Feel

Jim Morrison growled “Keep your eyes on the road, your hands upon the wheel.” Sage advice while driving. However, certain occasions arise when we are tempted to lift one hand from the wheel and extend a particular digit in response to some traffic transgression that has occurred against us. We used to call this gesture the Tampa Bay Turn Signal.

Try this the next time you feel like thrusting that one particular digit at another driver: use all ten. In Eastern traditions to bow to each other as a greeting is very common. This is actually more than just a greeting. The bow, with palms pressed together like a Western prayer, a hands breadth away from the nose, is the ‘sacred’ in you bowing to the ‘sacred’ in the other. Call it the sacred or Buddha or Vishnu or God or whatever you would like. Or think of it as recognizing our common humanity in each other. It is hard to stay pissed off at someone you are blessing.

As we discussed in Egoless Driving – Lesson One, there is no reason to allow any more stress into your life than you already have. Let it go by recognizing that you are the same as the other driver. Occasionally, you get distracted too. The act of letting go, forgiving if you like, empowers you to leave it behind. You won’t think about it all day. The stess will be gone – evaporated not from the heat but from the coolness of your response.

So next time you’re tempted to flip, try bowing. Put your palms together and nod your head slightly. Its as much for you as it is for them. You may want to wait until they pass by. If it turns out, in traffic, you bless someone you know, they’ll wonder even more about you.

Tags: On The Road, Think and Feel

When a tool is designed, it is designed to “do” something. A tool has no sense of being. It has no essential nature. As soon as the tool is in the hands of someone else, like a mechanic, it may well be used in any number of other ways. Tools lack purpose. The tool is only meant to do. It’s nature is situational. Is it a wrench or a hammer or a pry bar or a belaying pin? It IS what it is being used for. Vice Grips are a special, adaptable friend of truckers everywhere.

Vice grips hold open the release lever on the Tandem Axles of a trailer. A heavy load, rusty rails or a trailer parked on an incline can make it impossible to adjust the axles. A pair of Vice Grips clamped on a partially pulled lever will often help release them. Further, when I had Satellite Radio, I had a pair of Vice Grips clamped on the outside of my cab with the magnetic XM antenna attached to them. This antenna base, a rusty old pair of Vice Grips, has over 200,000 miles on it. I’ve even used Vice Grips to pin open a curtain in the window of my sleeper.

Today, in our Ceaseless Society, we expect human beings to multitask; multiple doing. Jon Kabat-Zinn says that Human Beings should really be called Human Doings, because we concentrate much more on doing than being. We can’t focus on doing something well while multitasking. If the coin of the realm is multitasking, hyper-doing, there is no time for, or any emphasis on, just being. No time to spend discovering our true purpose.

I heard this vivid phrase somewhere on NPR: Continous Partial Attention. Set your iPhone down for a second, if you are not giving full attention to what you are doing, you cannot do the best possible job on that task. If we live in the buzz of multiple tasks, we can’t possibly be living the best possible life. If we are constantly switching from this task to that one, are we giving the people we love any real attention? any dedicated face time? Do we really know what we actually want to do with our lives? When is the last time you stopped and really thought through what you want to do next? what you really want to do for a living? where you actually want to live? What is your true nature? What is your purpose?

Doing sounds like action, but it is essentially static. The tool goes from one task to the next without growth. There is no choice, just the next task. When you are doing, you are not living or growing. Being is dynamic but does not exclude accomplishment. While Doing is the mindless accomplishment of artificial, unconsidered goals, Being is the accomplishment of goals on a path; toward a purpose. These are handpicked, specific goals, chosen to further your life rather than simply to get someone off your back or to get that report off your desk. Purposeful Goals add up to a life worth living.

Can we just ‘be?’ Do we spend any time to quiet the world long enough to hear ourselves? We are making priorities every day under the crush of To Do Lists, Five Year Plans, Lunch appointments and Meetings, but do we know what we really value? Is there happiness and joy or stress and misery? Without some quiet “being time” to get in touch with what we really value, can we safely decide on anything? Are we even aware of a purpose beyond getting the next task done?

Fortunately, you are not a tool. A tool would never rather be doing something else. It has no sense of anything else, nor of a purpose. As a human, there is much greater depth in purpose. This depth, however, is unreachable when doing outweighs being. When a person is consumed in hyper-doing, they become like the tool; an inanimate object. There is no compassion, no empathy. There is no joy in the life of a tool.

When we can reconnect to ourselves and develop purpose, we can live in parallel to our essential nature rather than opposed to it. We can find joy and compassion and real living. Stress and misery are absent, because living toward a purpose, by definition, is effortlessly doing what we should do because it is what we want to do. In Being we are investing time rather than spending it. So invest a moment in being. Quiet the world long enough to truly consider what is worth your time. Accomplish something essential; something parallel with your purpose. Just be.

Tags: On The Road, Think and Feel

After I had entered the complex and drove around to the back, I dropped my trailer in the crisp predawn of a fall morning. I was by myself until another truck pulled around. He backed into a dock a few doors down from me. We both had to wait for the Receiving Office to open up. I had seen him walking around, he was a big guy. Suddenly, Showtunes burst from his cab. I could hear the unmistakably strains of Broadway belting, thumping through the sheet metal. It is a bit unnerving to think of a big burly truck driver listening to Showtunes. And he was blasting them. I could just see some fan of John Wayne Gacy slipping out of his truck to come see me, [hey, big guy] in a Clown Suit, with a straight razor. I shivered at the thought.

It was about ten ’til five, the guard said that Receiving would be open by now. I climbed down to go inside. About three steps toward Door 43 and I heard another door slam shut. I looked over my shoulder just to make sure there was no clown suit. At the office, the door was still locked.

As the other driver walked up to meet me at the door, he had the lazy back-heal saunter of a dimwit. He made up for this by being twice the size of a normal man. To put a fine edge on it, he was rotund, spherical almost. He looked like the Batman’s Penguin, if the Arch Criminal had fallen on hard times. He was in a tshirt and jeans rather than a tux and spats. His tshirt said “American by Birth. Christian by Grace.”

“Yep, after I leave here I go back into Indy and then to Oklahoma,” he said, as if I cared. His hair hung at odd angles, ripped as much as cut in the classic 5 minute Truckstop Barber Style. The sagging unshaven jowls gave him a unkept look that matched his clothes. I had to check if the printing on his shirt was metallic because the next thing he said was “Georgia Pacific, Muskogee, I hate that fuckin’ place.” I could swear the moonlight flashed a little on the words “Christian by Grace,” but I must have imagined it.

We stood there in uncomfortable silence for a few minutes. He seemed like the kind of guy who would spend a half hour considering what he should say in a given situation. In the end, it would always blurt out, semi-appropriate and uninteresting. His wedge into the greater social world blunter and less effective than he had hoped. I know this to be true because I’ve often done it myself.

The Rotund One broke back in, “You got a garage door on that trailer?”

I was still a little sleepy that morning; more than I thought. Stunned, I cast a glance at my trailer just 10 feet from the stairs we stood on. Damned if he wasn’t right! I had backed in to the dock without opening the doors. If Receiving ever opened, they wouldn’t be able to unload me anyway. Who’s the Dimwit now?!?!??

I kicked at the chock under my trailer wheel but it wouldn’t budge. The trailer would have to be pushed off of it. The Rotund Driver had followed me over. I walked back up front and climbed aboard. As I hooked back to the trailer and gave it shove, the driver leaned over and pulled the chock out for me. When I pulled forward to open the doors, he stepped around behind me and opened them up. I nudged the dock and he stepped up the stairs and into the now opened office. He had done his good deed for the day and I had had a lesson in the futility of prejudging someone. When I got inside, I thanked him.

Tags: On The Road, Think and Feel

Leaving Chicago to the west, I was soon reminded that Plains reach all the way into Illinois. I should have known, but it is hard for a guy from Michigan to realize the wide open plains are so close. The wind slashed at my windows and hit the trailer like Pacific Surge on the rocks of Big Sur. I was weaving my way across US30 toward Clinton, IA.

All the prairie towns seem lonely. Usually huddled around a river or a lake. There is a little car dealer, maybe only one fast food joint, a family restaurant, a hardware store and a sporting goods store. Sometimes these last two are the same. Today, the snow is gone and the rivers are swollen. In the prespring days of early March, the mud along the road looks more alive than the lawns. Everything is brown and grey, waiting for resurrection and the green and blue of spring.

Before I reach the Mississippi, I cross a National Wildlife Refuge. Not much wildlife, but all the trees, bushes and clumps of grass are wearing ice skirts. The rising water had frozen and when it receded, left a little ice tutu around each.

Truckers will tell you, with a wry smile, that Dispatchers lie. A broker is a dispatcher who will probably never talk to you again. How much care does he have to put into this transaction? I’m hauling a broker load. The directions seem easy; US30 west, go south on US67 which turns into 2nd Ave, to 1219 2nd Ave South.

I cross the bridge and the “Big Muddy” into Iowa. It is a typical rivertown trying to make in the modern world; touristy stuff and a casino mix with the remnants of industry on the river bank. Huge refinery stacks and old brick buildings form the romantic backdrop to your big weekend at the blackjack table. Turning South on US67, I am confronted with construction. Everywhere. Apparently, the casino is spending some money on Civic Pride and Beautification. The road, that I would have guessed I need to take, is closed. A bunch of guys in orange vests are doing their best to keep warm rather than finishing the fancy brick pedestrian crosswalk.

US67 curves West and then South again. I’ve lost 2nd Ave, but there is nowhere to turn around. Clinton is chock full of heavy industry. Refineries, food processing, packaging. All the way through town, I never saw 2nd Ave. again. There is, however, a small truckstop. It is time to call for help.

Dispatch gave me the customer’s phone number and a very nice lady, who says she is in a different building, gave me directions to where I need to be. She knew the address I had, she must be right. The Broker’s directions were completely wrong! I needed to go North on US67. My new directions are US67, stoplight North of US30, turn right, turn left on 2nd Ave, under a bridge and then under a Railroad Bridge, second on the left.

I wind my way back through town and cross US30. My stoplight is right where it is supposed to be – turn right, then left. I turn into a city street that hasn’t changed since the war. I mean the big one – WWII. There is Nora’s Cafe, Herb’s TV repair, Family Furniture and Lexington Apartments – a real honest-to-goodness apartment block. It is 5 stories and the whole block. Miscellaneous retail fills the first floor along with a State Agency and the Landlord. “Furnished Apartments Available. First Week Free.”

I am looking down a long Main Street from the old days. It used to be a concentration of trade. Everyone went downtown to buy anything. Those days are long gone. There a couple mumbling bums walking around with plastic grocery bags dripping with collected cans, but it is just me and them. This is exactly why First Weeks are free around here. It is why Ace Remodeling, Flaming Dragon Body Art and Joe’s Comics can afford the rent.

It occurs to me that this long, romantically retro, main street goes on for a long while without going under any kind of bridge. Waking from my internal monologue, the addresses are going up and I am in the 1400′s already. This is a problem. It sneaks into the back of my head that the address suffix was “South” – 1219 2nd Ave. South. I’m going the wrong direction. The road is getting less retail, more residential, and narrower. Turning around 80′ of truck and trailer, as always, is going to be interesting.

US67 turns left on the way out of town. The turn is tight in a secondary downtown strip going East and West. It is my best option, and luckily, in a couple blocks there is a gas station/convenience store with a large plaza and fuel area. Left off US67 and left on another side street and I can turn through the plaza and head back down US67 the other way.

As you might have guessed, I’m still 5 blocks away from the intersection where this all started and I can already see two bridges. Back past the Lexington Apartments, which should really be Lexington Arms, I’m going under a bridge. The bridge I crossed the Mississippi on. Directly after it is the Railroad Bridge. I’ve arrived.

If I had kept my head up and my wits about me, I would have made the right turn. From the stoplight, I could have seen the two bridges if I had only wasted the calories on turning my head to the right. I’ve got good instincts, when I use them. My morning would have been smoother and less stressful. All for the turning of my neck!

It works for life too. So what are you doing? Are you paying attention to where you should be going? Or are you just following someone else’s directions? Take a stake in your destination.

Tags: On The Road, Think and Feel