What Can You Learn From Your Drive?

The other day I noticed something. The difference in my driving and my husband’s driving totally reflects our personality differences.

My husband’s driving has radically improved in our umpteen years of marriage. In the beginning, it seemed he went from one speeding ticket to a car wreck about as regularly as I went to the grocery store. It’s now been years since he’s had a ticket or an accident, although I still often offer prayers for safety when he drives. Here’s the difference between us. When he drives, his head is constantly in the game. He drives like he’s playing Tetris—speeding to fill all the empty spaces on the road. (I wonder how his driving would differ if we didn’t have to navigate Orange County’s heavy traffic? What if we lived somewhere with empty roads? I wonder how that would be?)

On the other hand, I drive mostly on auto-pilot. My head is RARELY in the game. I’m usually thinking about something else…something fictional if I’m alone. If I have a passenger, then I’m more focused on the conversation than the ride. I’m pretty much obtuse to the other cars on the road or what’s going on around me. This is why I’ve sat at an airport terminal, deep in a telephone conversation and almost missed a plane. Or how I once finished a writing stint at a library and stood up to notice (just then) a person not five feet away from me must have had a heart attack because he was surrounded by EMTs, and a crowd of people.

I’m not saying one way of driving, or navigating through life, is better or worse than another. I’m just pointing out the difference, and maybe thinking about how great it is that I have someone whose head is always in the game, because mine is usually not.

And so I ask—what does your driving say about you?

I read this great article—you can read it here. But if you don’t want to read all of it, here are some things that made me stop and think.

The way we do anything is the way we do everything.

The truth is we aren’t split. We’re whole. We can’t drop the ball in one area of life and expect our other areas to function smoothly.

The habits we practice in one area of life, become our lives.

The five people we hang out with most in life, the way we operate on a daily basis, is our life.

When we make tiny changes in one area of life, we affect other areas like the wings of a butterfly starting a tsunami on the other side of the world.

When we finally realize that the way we do anything is the way we do everything, we have the power to change every aspect of our lives.

So—what do you want to change?