I motored westward on I-40 toward Death Valley. My car, Thor, was loaded with gear, a funk CD compiled by DJ Don Durango, and directions to a top-secret campsite with views reputed to induce something akin to Nirvana. I was little more than an hour into my getaway when I nosed up behind a swarm of RVs living large in both lanes, chugging away at top speeds of about 45 mph.
I moved into the passing lane. Chaka Khan made it all the way through “Tell Me Something Good” before the RV in front of me began to muster the octane it needed to speed up and move over.
My impatience spiked. My impatience bubbled. Bill Withers encouraged me to keep on using him until I used him up, but all I wanted was to get There. When the RV eventually lurched its wide rear end out of the passing lane, I dropped a spectacularly immature leaden foot onto my accelerator, zoomed up a hill and registered a startling number onto the radar gun the stealth highway patrol officer pointed at my car.
Busted.
Busted for diverting petty emotional drama into my driving. Busted for velocity psychosis—the delusional idea that fast is where it’s at. Busted for zooming to a place where my aim was to go slower.
A few weeks later I sat in a Seligman court beneath an Arizona state flag large enough to tent my house. Remorse, embarrassment and shame lobbed wrecking balls inside my head. After I was given an elegant lecture and the consequences I deserved, I meandered into larger thoughts: Is traffic school an oxymoron? Was my speeding ticket a cosmic indictment on the rest of my life? What kind of sham go-slow disciple am I if I drive like Wile E. Coyote jacked on meth?
Like everyone I know who was 16 when I was, I bee lined to the Department of Motor Vehicles the day after my birthday. It wasn’t just a driver’s license I was after, it was status and emancipation and that rigid little plastic rectangle that conferred club membership. Driving meant I was cool. It meant freedom. It meant I was a symbolic step closer to adulthood, which had the allure and promise of the New World. And it mostly meant I could sneak out at night to drive to the high school party always happening near Lake Hollingsworth.
I’ve been driving longer than I’ve been voting, longer than the full development of the frontal lobe of my brain, longer than I have displayed and lived into the behaviors that define maturity. Am I good driver? Not all the time. I’ve had three traffic tickets in my four decades of driving, but that math doesn’t reflect my wider reality. I’ve sped many, many times without being caught, mostly on highways, mostly in a state of distracted mindlessness. I’m not sure why I do it, especially because I don’t consider myself as someone who brings anything into my driving except a desire to go from Point A to Point B. I’m not plagued with road rage. Speeding doesn’t feed a need for thrill seeking. I’m not Type A or in a particular hurry to get most places.
I think about the rest of my life and the calibrations I’ve made to my daily speedometer. I live conscious of my consumerism (except in the area of shoes). I am a wholehearted diner in the slow food movement. I stumble through the teachings and insights of Buddhism, and I’ve edited my life to value its purpose more than its pace. Why doesn’t my driving life align with the time I am not in my car?
Maybe my driving is my final frontier in my own personal slow movement. I know in my head about the dangers of speed on the highway. Part of my recent fine was completing an online defensive driving course that starred a somber narrator relaying grisly accidents caused by excessive speed. While this isn’t the kind of approach that usually spurs me to change my behavior, it did make me think further.
Kierkegaard lamented that we are prone to pursuing pleasure with such breathless haste that we rush past it. Maybe it’s not about going fast. Maybe it is about waking up and realizing that I take my life with me everywhere I go–no matter how I get there.
