AS a teenager, my neighbor named Junior taught me how to drive an old battered jeep (one of those left behind by the American army after liberation). It was my tentative initiation to manual driving using two pedals for clutch and gas. I stalled out the first time I tried to get the vehicle started. Then the second time. And then a third time. Junior kept yelling at me: ‘Timplahin mo yung tapak mo sa gas at pedal!’ Finally, on the fourth attempt, I got the old jeep going. When Junior saw that I could stop and start the car consistently and shift gears without grinding the clutch, he left me to it.
I really didn’t get the hang of it since it was only for one day, actually just a few hours. I didn’t get the chance to improve my driving skills further because our family didn’t own a car.
I did not drive my own car till I was 25. It was my first car, a second-hand Volkswagen Beetle made in Brazil. I enrolled in a nearby driving school. In two weeks, I re-learned the skills from my initial driving lesson with Junior as a teenager.
More than five decades have passed and stick shift driving is still the only way I know when I’m behind the wheel. The sequence of primera, segunda, tercera, quatra is now embedded in my mind. Quinta came later. Just my ever-curious mind asking: why the Spanish terms? Did Filipino drivers learn to drive the automobile during Spanish colonial times? Most people these days never learn how to drive manual. It takes real timing and coordination to get the clutch and gas right. This is why new models are now automatic, featuring one speed driving.
But some people I know say that driving a 5-speed car is more fun. There are at least 11 songs about the glories of stick shift driving. From the Beach Boys to Bruce Springsteen.
But I’m not one to sing ‘Fun Fun Fun’ with the Beach Boys. To be fully honest, I’ve never been inclined to drive. I only drive because I have to. Unlike some of people, I don’t find pleasure in driving.
Driving can be taxing and tiring for me, especially as I’m in my mid-70s. I prefer to sit and let someone else do the driving. That way, I can look at the passing scene with more concentration. This is why when I’m alone, I like to park our car somewhere and then go by commuting by train or ride sharing. When I have to take a taxi, I like drivers to be reticent to allow me to think better or to look out the window without being distracted by idle chatter. I use the time in between destinations for mental jogging-to daydream, compose my jangled thoughts, conjure concepts.
This is the reason I seldom drive nowadays. However, I do get on the driver’s seat for a few reasons: to bring my wife to her doctor, or the mall or to one of the wakes of one of her deceased friends or former classmates. She is afflicted with severe arthritis on both knees. She uses two canes and a portable wheelchair, which my eldest, a daughter who is still single by choice, is only too glad to push.
When I’m behind the wheel, I try to apply Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching, which dates back to 2,500 years ago. Tao is translated as ‘the way.’ I keep in mind one of the encompassing insights of Lao Tzu:
Be like water.
I look at the road like a river. On a boat, I go with the flow.
I become one with the car. Without being conscious about it, each movement of the gear stick-first gear, second gear, third gear, fourth gear-is like my inner energy flowing. The balancing of one foot on the clutch and another on the gas pedal happens instinctively. Driving is done at an unconscious level, as the hand shifts gears and feet pedal in and out in one graceful movement like in a dance.
As someone says: ‘It is Tao in a car. It is balance and beauty, restraint and movement, human and machine.’
It’s all about perception, responsiveness, and flow. Because I go with the flow, I don’t drive too fast nor too slow.
Driving can be a spiritual exercise. You get to flex your spiritual virtues of patience, compassion and mindfulness.
Patience is one of them. I heed road signs and I obey traffic lights. If there is traffic, I don’t complain or whine. It will move eventually. If there is a vehicle that wants to move ahead of me (honking or flashing its lights) I slow down and give way. I don’t let my pride or temper get the better of me by trying to impede him or compete with it. When there are obstructions, like a stalled vehicle or a slow moving 6-wheeler, I patiently and cautiously go around it or overtake it.
Then there is the virtue of compassion. I slow down whenever I see lines on a designated pedestrian lane, as I respect people who have to walk to get to places. Some of them are hurrying to get to their place of work, or to visit a beloved in a hospital, or to buy medicines, to pawn a jewelry to pay for an overdue water or electric bill or to get home to feed their families. I imagine how tired they must be when they get to their respective destinations.
Mindfulness is another virtue. I am always mindful of motorcycle drivers who tend to overtake on the right side so I give space for them to pass through. I don’t tail gate, always allowing some space between our car and the car ahead.
If only all drivers would learn to embrace the ‘tao’ on the road, we would probably never have road rage incidents or minimize accidents.
Yet looking ahead, driving will become an extinct skill in the future entirely. Geared transmissions will be a thing of the past. The wave of self-driving EVs in the market is a significant indicator that driving in less than three decades in the future will go obsolete.
Even car wheels will become obsolete. Vehicles that will get you from here to there will move by levitation, the way we saw it in the movie Star Wars.
Cars as we know them will just become museum pieces in tomorrow’s world. Children of future generations will be ogling at relics of the SUVs we are driving at the moment and will be laughing at their strange driving mechanics the way we now laugh at the first automotive vehicles like the model T Ford.The technology of mobility may change. But there will always be roads. Lao Tzu’s 2,500-year-old teachings will never become extinct. Whether on the road or in your life, you’ll never get lost as long as you are on the path of the Tao Te Ching.
As one book says: as long as we go with the flow, the Tao teaches us how to live our lives without crashing into one another.