Driver's Ed.

Let's waste time

Chasing cars

Around our heads.

- Chasing Cars by Snow Patrol

As some of you might know, Bethel is not accessible by road from the outside. It makes me think of Pleasantville sometimes when Reese Witherspoon's character asks, "Outside of Pleasantville? Like, what's at the end of Main Street?" and her teacher replies, "Mary Sue. You should know the answer to that! The end of Main Street is just the beginning again". Most of the roads within the town are winding bumpy silt roads that weave you around the residential areas. There are two "stoplights" (and by stoplight I mean yellow blinking lights) on the one "highway" (and by highway I mean a paved single lane road where going 40mph feels like you're Marty McFly driving the Delorean it's so fast). With this in mind, this is one of the reasons why people don't normally lock their cars. Because if someone stole it, seriously where are you going to go? Despite this, we had heard that recently there was a "high speed" car chase around town that only ended with one of the guys running out of gas or something. I would love to know what brought such an endeavor on and how they thought it was going to end.

When I have access to Fr. Chuck's church truck when he's gone I usually drive some of my roommates to work in the morning. Now many of you from home that have seen me drive can sympathize with Michael's comment to me this morning where he said as I was waiting to turn back onto the highway, "You know, this is the scariest part of my day". See the problem is, is that I can't always tell how far away a car is or judge how fast it's going. So I have this constant interior monologue of, "Oh here comes a car... should I go... now? No it's too close... crap no it wasn't I should have gone... Should I now? Uhhh no too close too close. Oh it's clear... crap, no it's not, but I'm in the middle of the road anyway... go go go!!!" After Michael had said this my response was, "well I've never actually killed anyone so that's good". Oh if the DMV only knew.

All of this discussion about driving got me thinking about that proverbial driver's wheel in my life. Then lyrics from a favorite Incubus song draw my mind's attention: Sometimes, I feel the fear of uncertainty stinging clear/And I can't help but ask myself how much I let the fear/Take the wheel and steer. Do I drive my life the way I drive a car, where I'm either too cautious or too head on? Do I like knowing the rules and guidelines while simultaneously not being able to see when to use them? Or am I like those men chasing each other around a town that has no exit? Why is there no road map in life or to God's Divine Will? Or is there and we are too distracted to notice?

I keep thinking about that car chase. Maybe they just felt stuck, confined by the bordering tundra. Perhaps it was representative of their caged emotion, unable to get away completely yet unable to control its movement within you. That stirring seething fiery emotion that chases reason around inside of you until it just can't anymore or it explodes. Though it probably sound idiotic to say, but I admire those car chasers. Sometimes I want to just be able to through reason out the window and let it disperse as it crashes on the hot pavement. Allow emotion, spontaneity, and lunacy to drive me, rather than me driving them away as I sometimes do. I'd also love to schedule an appointed "loose my mind" time, perhaps on a bi-weekly basis...just kidding.

Maybe what I'm really getting at in this reflection is to simply say, "wake up!". Do what you need to do to realize the potential of each day, to be able to quiet our souls enough to hear God say "this way" or "that way", to remember that we're alive (hopefully without doing harm to ourselves or to others that is). We get so caught up in everything. I've even got caught up writing this post because I've been trying to multitask. Carpe diem. Seize the day and make it live.

If I lay here

If I just lay here
Would you lie with me and just forget the world?

Forget what we're told
Before we get too old

Show me a garden that's bursting into life

Let's waste time
Chasing cars

Around our heads