Motorized transportation, he argued, eats up miles and makes surrounding scenery small and insignificant. ‘You’ve seen it all; yet, you’ve seen nothing.’
-Arthur Boers, Living Into Focus, p. 26
We spend so much time in vehicles.
I have had profound experiences while driving: like the first time I realized that as I was driving home from work, I was also driving toward Venus; or when, while driving during sunrise, my then six-year-old daughter explained to me that the only reason we can’t see stars during the day is that the sun outshines them (thus shedding new light on Rev. 21:21: “The city does not need the sun or the moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and the Lamb is its lamp”). I told her she should start writing a commentary on Revelation. I ‘read’ G.K. Chesterton for the first time while driving (I actually listened to an audiobook of Orthodoxy). I’ve traveled with Aslan and Mr. Tumnus and Bilbo Baggins and Ratty and Mr. Toad and Napolean the pig and Major the horse. I’ve rolled down the windows to smell the saline-ocean-air during much needed vacations.
Yet, with all those great experiences, I often find myself in a stupor. I read somewhere that we essentially turn on mental autopilot within a couple of minutes of beginning a drive that we are accustomed to. I’ve experienced it.
C.S. Lewis has been described as “a mind awake.” I resonate with that description, because that is one of the things I learned from Lewis: to open my eyes and be awake at all times. I have learned the same lesson from G.K. Chesterton. Don’t be content to see without seeing, or hear without hearing. Give yourself over to quiddity whenever morally possible, even when driving.
A couple of months ago I was coming out of a grocery store, about to head home after a long day of work. I was tired. A few minutes earlier rain had begun to pour down hard. As I crossed the threshold of the door and stood underneath the overhang of the roof, a young man ran by screaming curse words at the rain. In that moment I realized that in my heart I was about to do the same thing. I didn’t want to get soaked before a long drive.
But that young man’s cursing at the rain was a bucket of ice water on my soul. My mind went to Chesterton’s essay about a man running after his hat on a windy day. Chesterton’s words rolled around in my head. I then proceeding to walk, and twirl, through the rain while loudly quoting,
An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.
I stood outside my car for an extra minute to make sure I had absorbed the full quiddity by getting fully soaked. My drive home turned out to be one of the most enjoyable I had had in a while. And my kids loved hearing the story, and fully wished that they could have been with me. Soak it all in, my friends. Live.
I love that quote from Chesterton.
In regards to soaking in our experiences, there is a quote from Lewis, which I cannot find at the moment, where he remarks on how modern transportation has obliterated our ability to understand time and space. He was speaking mainly about the train at the time, but of course, the idea transfers.
Wendell Berry, also comments on the need to travel in ways that are conducive to a fuller awareness of where we are in “The Atlantic” http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1991/02/out-your-car-your-horse/309159/ He writes:
“II. Global thinking can only be statistical. Its shallowness is exposed by the least intention to do something. Unless one is willing to be destructive on a very large scale, one cannot do something except locally, in a small place. Global thinking can only do to the globe what a space satellite does to it: reduce it, make a bauble of it. Look at one of those photographs of half the earth taken from outer space, and see if you recognize your neighborhood. If you want to see where you are, you will have to get out of your space vehicle, out of your car, off your horse, and walk over the ground. On foot you will find that the earth is still satisfyingly large, and full of beguiling nooks and crannies.”
I have one observation about Berry’s take on ‘global thinking.’ It goes back to my paraphrase of 1 Cor. 13:4-5.
Love is not self-inflated (arrogant) or self-assertive (rude). Our digital culture has allowed us to extend our reach dramatically. I wrote a post quite a while back about technologies as prosthetics (the phone as an extension of the ear and voice, tv as an extension of the eyes, etc).
We have allowed our reach to puff us up. As the self-gets bigger, the world gets smaller. And we assert ourselves. It’s not enough that we should be pushy with those in our house or workplace. Now we can be pushy with people all over the world via the internet. And as we get bigger, and push ourselves outward, the world must necessarily become smaller.
That type of environment is not conducive to love. If I am to love something, I have to see it as worthy of love. And if I am a giant in the midst of a bunch of fleas…Only disdain and annoyance remains.
“And as we get bigger, and push ourselves outward, the world must necessarily become smaller.” I don’t know that I’ve connected our shrinking of the world to the enlarging of our own egos. It makes sense. Technology amplifies power.
Usually, you give greater power to “he who is faithful with little.” Technology is a way of acquiring power regardless of faithfulness. Thus, if we were making a mess before technology, we are destined to make a bigger mess after it. If we lived pridefully before, why wouldn’t we disdain the world after acquiring more power?
This particular line of the book also struck me. My mind went directly to the nature of the land that is lost when we only travel by vehicles, which was so keenly expressed by Wendell Berry in the comment above.
Many of us do not know the land in which we reside, well not in an intimate way, the way you get to know a place by walking it. I have fond youthful memories roaming the neighborhoods where I grew up riding bikes, catching craw-dads and exploring creeks. I still live within 25 miles of the area in which I grew up, but have no where near the connection with the land I had as a child.
I have a fascination with what I think might be some of the most overlooked subjects of nature- insects, an obscure tiny bloom among the grasses, the detail of bark when looking closely. As an adult I still love to explore such things when there is leisure time and I have a camera in hand. However, that happens very little and I mostly try to resist the urge to multitask myself to death in the car as I drive.
In recent years, I have been challenged by maintaining these focal practices which allow me to appreciate the details of my own environment. This challenge has led me to realize A) the experience is not a given B) that I appreciate the experience C) what I love about the experience is the calming, peaceful connectedness that is gained through the experience. I don’t know what exactly it is about the calm, peace, or connectedness that draws me to these practices, but that is what draws me to this book and the conversation on this blog.