I’ve been spending a fair bit of time on the road of late with my work, mostly on the nation’s degenerating motorway system dodging, as you do, bumps, potholes, tailbacks and mad people who pull out without warning or come screaming up your rear in the fast lane when there’s clearly a slow-moving line of twenty cars directly in front and nowhere else to go. But anticipating and evading the potentially devastating effects of poor surface maintenance or reckless hand and foot movements of others on wheel and pedal, presumably respectively, that I may arrive at my chosen destination in one piece, while the essential subtext of my driving experience, has not always been the overriding stream of thought in my mind as I’ve negotiated the tired tarmac of our green and pleasant land. On my most recent trip up the M23, for instance, having exhausted the joys of the radio and the six CDs in the cartridge and deciding finally on the sound of road-whoosh, I fell into a line of internal dialogue the development of which, as a driving distraction, has become a hot favourite for me of late: your body as a motor vehicle. It’s a hackneyed metaphor, I know but nonetheless highly convenient and appropriate in light of the high-speed journey most of us are making along the hazardous fast lane of the Great Thoroughfare these days. Against a backdrop of modern life’s spiritual pot holes, its emotional bumps, the intense competition screaming up your rear to be great, look great and earn great amounts, the workload tailbacks and senseless decisions of others that affect your own progress and possibly directly or indirectly endanger your existence, there you sit, as it were, in this vehicle, your body, doing your best to get you and any passengers or dependants from cradle to grave safe and sound without getting caught speeding nor without slowing down anyone else or doing them damage as you go and just as when driving, you have a variety of options available to you, the choice of which will completely determine the kind of experience and outcome you have on the road. You can resist the whole idea of making the journey in the first place and thus in unconscious reflexive response hunch your neck and shoulders, depress your chest, inhibit your breathing, use too much strength in your arms and hands to turn the wheel as you handle all the momentarily miniscule internal and external shifts of direction you undertake every day; you can keep your lumbar region crumpled and legs stiff and feet tense on the peddles that determine all the myriad accelerations and decelerations involved in your local affairs, thus wastefully expending precious vital energy and leaving yourself prey to stress and lowered immune response, or you can graciously accept where you are in the moment and choose to make the best of it, come what may, by expansively relaxing your body, lengthening your spine, breathing freely and only using as much energy as is required to do what must be done, thus conserving precious vitality for general well-being. You can accelerate and break with excessive pedal pressure and sharpness or keep your actions smooth and light, likewise the way you begin, sustain and close any particular project or endeavour. You can distract yourself with the music of your inner stereo, getting lost in your thoughts, or let your symphony be the sound of you bringing the fullness of yourself to bear on the task at hand. You can choose to love and look after the vehicle you’re in, or hate and neglect it. Even the most pragmatic anti-animist knows that when you get in your car and say hello nicely to it, it drives much better than when you treat it with disdain. Above all, you can treat the entire enterprise of life as a race with your fellow humans, always pushing for maximum advantage to be the first to reach the final destination: death, or you can simply regard it as a journey to be enjoyed and valued for what it is, a most edifying and mystifying motion of body and soul that lasts for 79 years or so if you’re lucky and then suddenly stops, whichever way you play it, regardless of whether the lunatic in the 2 litre Vauxhall with a penis complex gets to the M25 interchange before you or not. –
