I went to the US with some friends last summer. We rented a car in Denver with the intention of driving nearly a thousand miles to the Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks in Wyoming.
We got to the car rental after a long flight, sticky, smelly and aching for bed, only to find that the car we’d booked hadn’t had its GPS unlocked or something. Basically, we couldn’t use it.
They upgraded us to another, slightly bigger car – this being the US, I can tell you the first was already pretty gigantic – however, this one didn’t have a parcel shelf, and since we would be leaving our luggage in the vehicle most days, we decided it was not ideal to have it all on show.
So, we were upgraded to another, even bigger car. “What does that red squiggly light on the dash mean?” I asked the sales rep. Broken suspension it turns out.
Upgraded again. A BIGGER car. We’d been upgraded by this point by about $75,000 worth of car.
My friends fell in love with our brand new Mercedes GLS 450 on sight. I – who was driving us to our accommodation – was more apprehensive, considering that sight was something we were quickly losing to a spectacular sunset.
We put our suitcases under the helpful parcel shelf and hopped in. It was like climbing into an aircraft. Lights everywhere and so high tech none of us had modern enough cables to charge our phones in any of the ports. There were buttons for everything. And I mean everything. There was nothing manual in this car except the seatbelt, and as soon as I clipped that in, the seat decided to self-adjust until the belt garrotted me. Seemed like the aversion between the car and me was mutual.
This was my first time ever driving abroad. I’m from the UK, I drive on the left, my driver’s seat is on the right, the mirrors are not strange curved shapes that make everything outside look at a different distance depending which one I used. I also drive the lowest tech electric out there so I am not used to slow braking or soft acceleration to keep madam engine happy, nor having to sift through two hundred buttons and switches to find my windscreen wipers.
In conclusion, being responsible for three lives in an expensive car-beast on that dark, exhausting night in a foreign land, felt as if I’d been forced to learn to drive all over again. Without a teacher.
And that, I think, is what the road to freedom looks like: learning to drive a car, I mean. At first we must make a consistent, often overwhelming, stream of choices – which mirror to look into, which gear to use, how much to turn the wheel, accelerator, brake . . . until eventually – click – it turns into a single choice: driving. The choices we had struggled with before become second nature and life feels light and easy. We have moved into a higher mode of being, free from the clutter of lesser decision making.
Freedom, I think, is the moral aim of movement towards this higher mode of being. To a state of less susceptibility and manipulability by lower interests and passions. Building a house, for example, is a lesser passion than building a home, yet the latter cannot be reached without working through the former.
I have built a house. It has stalled short of becoming a home, through both my own failing and circumstance. To this degree I am now trapped by it, unable to move into the reason for the many little decisions that a house requires to remain fit of purpose. Trapped for thirteen years in the overwhelming cockpit of a Mercedes, never able to make it drive.
Accepting failure is a hard thing to do. Accepting that perhaps I have manipulated myself into creating something hollow. Even now, having chosen to give it all up, I wonder if I am unworthy to use ‘giving up’ as the appropriate tool of self-correction.
It’s safe to say selling my house hasn’t ‘clicked’ yet either.
But it will.
As for the Mercedes; well, our personalities never really ‘clicked’. She continued to garrot me from time to time and I berated her for not having a dipstick for her oil (got a button for that too, apparently). But driving wasn’t an issue after that first night. We found our happy place together off-road, chasing wild horses and thunderstorms.
It kinda felt like freedom.
What experiences have you had, where something eventually ‘clicks’ into place? What are you still working on?