:: worlds in words ::

Everybody has their coping mechanisms.  Some people eat, some drink, some work out, some clean – me, I drive.  When I get angry, when I get overwhelmed, when I want to go out and clear my head, there’s nothing that’s quite as soothing to me as getting behind the wheel, filling up my tank, and blasting it down long and winding country roads – or whatever’s closest to ‘em where I’m at.

There’s something about driving that really gets me.  I could drive forever.  Not the bustling, busy city streets with stop signs, traffic lights, and pedestrians – no, that only serves to further whatever tendencies of rage I house within my head.  When I’m driving in the city, I wish I had a fifty-cal turret-mounted to my vehicle.  But when I’m driving out on the back roads, I feel serene.

It’s such an all-encompassing experience.  I’m strapped into a metal box on wheels going a hundred, hundred fifty kilometers per hour.  The window’s down, the music’s cranked, and I’ve got a cigarette in my hand.  Just watching the world go rushing by, watching the rain falling on my windshield, watching the sun go down…  Me and my car.  Me in my car.  Me as my car.

There are a few things in life which I think are transcendental experiences.  For me, these are when I am not doing something, but when something is happening through me, or when I think I’m channeling something completely other to myself.  This experience, to me, is perfectly summed up in one quote from Bruce Lee’s Tao of Jeet Kune Do:

I’m moving and not moving at all.  I’m like the moon underneath the waves that ever go on rolling and rocking.  It is not, “I am doing this,” but rather, an inner realization that “this is happening through me,” or “it is doing this for me.”  The consciousness of self is the greatest hindrance to the proper execution of all physical action.

That’s from the very first page from the first chapter, On Zen.  And I do think that when I’m in that zone where I’ve gone past the self that I’m starting to find my path to the Tao.  Martial arts is an obvious one.  When I’m really in the right frame of mind – which is no mind at all – I am greater than myself.  Acting – when I used to act, anyway.  When it wasn’t just memorization of lines and blocking and thinking about what I’m doing, what I should be doing, and what I’m going to be doing next, but when I actually become the character and realize him in my body.

Writing, too, though this happens much less often for me nowadays if at all.  Writing and music both.  I used to call it the muse, but to me, what I call the muse is part of the Tao.  It’s when I can write something – a piece of poetry, lyrics, music, stories, what have you – without even knowing what I’m writing.  I’m not grasping for my theory or reaching for words.  Something just flows out of me, and that’s when I know it’s real.  When I’m thinking and writing, trying to force something out, I know it’s not true writing.  I remember some times when I wrote something, looked down at the page, and couldn’t understand what I’d written until someone else read it and explained it to me.

Driving can sometimes be a Zen experience for me.  Seriously, stop laughing.  I know it sounds retarded.  But there’s just something so liberating and open about just driving without knowing where you’re going.  I don’t think, I don’t react – I just drive.  The roads open up before me, and I choose to go down them or not.  I drink in the sights and smells of the world around me.  I am invigorated, renewed, I am alive and in motion.

I’ll catch myself singing along to the music without even knowing that I’m doing it sometimes.  I’ll open up my mind and think.  Receive without transmitting.  I let it all flow through me.  I know that this probably sounds less like a meditative experience and more like just dangerous driving – if it sounds like that, then in my defense, I think I’m just describing this extremely poorly.

A meditative experience – in my eyes – is not necessarily analogous to sitting down in an empty room, hands folded in my lap, eyes closed.  It can be very passive, yes, but it doesn’t mean inattentive or unresponsive.  Fighting is a meditative experience.  Improvising jazz on a live stage is a meditative experience.

Does it sound like hippie horseshit?  Sure, you know, I can admit to that.  Even as I’m writing it, I’m kinda shaking my head because it all sounds so damn silly.  But I find peace in it.  Just the other day, I went for a drive.  Only about an hour’s worth, really, and the whole ordeal took me about eight hours total – I had to take my car into the shop to get a bunch of work done on her first, and then had to take her back into another shop when I hit the first town (I’d left the car for months while I was away) for more work.

Even after waiting for hours upon hours for mechanics to work their magic and dropping an unexpected amount of money on repairs, not to mention all the shit that made me want to go for a drive in the first place, I finally hit the road again.  It was dark, and it was perfect.  It’s so different from being in the city, where I’m just frustrated and angry and so different from being on the big highway, where I’m just bored and half-asleep (as well as frustrated and angry, most of the time – on the 401, at least).

I think that I love driving like that almost more than anything else.  It’s more calming than my other relaxations – and it comes to me easier.  If I won the lottery, I’d love to get a place out on the edge of some town with a nice, powerful, but old car and just drive.  New cars are nice – and I’d rather have a new car than the one I’ve got now, don’t get me wrong – but old vehicles with ‘personality’ are the best for cruising, I find.

Ride on.