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.