To trust the road ahead

Yesterday I crawled out of bed and into my car at 5am to start an early morning trek over Snoqualmie Pass in order to be somewhere for work by 8am. Bleary-eyed and armed with coffee, I began the drive.

I don’t really like driving. I’ve always wanted to like driving – to be one of those whimsical souls who rolls down the windows, cranks up the music, and cruises down the highway for hours on end without a care in the world. To be one of those people who lives for the road. But the truth is, I get sleepy and restless from sitting for too long, I’m easily lost in my thoughts and find myself accidentally driving 15 mph under the speed limit and getting flipped off, and music in the car stresses me out (though I like listening to it – I just tend to adjust the volume every 30 seconds to match the fluctuating heaviness of traffic/weather/moods of other people in the car/etc.).

A few days before Christmas, I hit an unexpected patch of black ice and spun off the road into a snowy ditch on my way home – the same drive I did yesterday. I somehow came out of it without a scratch – as did my dog and my Jeep – but ever since then I’ve cringed at the thought of driving long distances (which I’ve done a lot of over the last couple of weeks for work purposes). It feels silly, considering the fact that it was such a minor incident and I was able to get back on the road all by myself with four-wheel drive – but it scared me.

Yesterday morning in the darkness of the mountain pass, I found myself white-knuckled from gripping the steering wheel so tightly, nose pressed to the windshield trying to follow the fading lines on the road through the fog, and holding my breath as semi trucks barreled past me, spraying me with muddy water while my windshield wipers furiously tried to keep up.

I can’t tell you how many times I finally got up to speed and set my cruise control, only to hit my brakes a few seconds later out of fear. Irrational fear. Fear of spinning off the road again. Fear of falling asleep. Fear of drifting into the lane next to me and sideswiping another car. Fear of not being able to see the fading lines and driving straight off the road into a lake. Fear of tensing up out of fear, making the above list of catastrophic events 10x more likely.

I think about my life, and how hauntingly familiar this pattern looks and feels deep down in my bones. Fear, spurring on more fear. How one minor spin off the road can disable us to the point of distrust and obsessive control and dangerous paralysis.

I find myself afraid of failing or saying the wrong thing or making the wrong decision – because I’ve done so before, and it’s a very real possibility. But fear of failing or saying the wrong thing or making the wrong decision finds me afraid to move forward at all – afraid to press down on the gas, to get up to full speed, to trust the road ahead. Instead I find myself hitting the brake far before I reach my full potential, tensing up, and trailing behind a semi truck in the slow lane because I’m too scared to try and pass on the left.

I have a hard time trusting the road right now. I remember when I was first learning to drive at age 15 and taking a curve at 70 mph on the freeway made me nervous. “I’m going too fast! I feel like I’m going to fly off the road or tip over or something!” I said to my older sister once.

“The road was designed for this, Jessica. It was engineered for this speed,” she told me. I’ve always remembered that. I think of it often.

The truth is, we might spin off the road at some point in life. We probably will, in fact. Maybe multiple times. But what would it look like to put fear to rest amidst the rain, the darkness, the narrow passages, and the barreling competition, and to trust the road? To trust that Someone goes ahead of us and lays a path before us, specific to our particular journey? To trust that we are covered by Someone Else’s forethought and care and that we need not brake every 10 seconds or go through life white-knuckled and afraid? What would it look like to trust the reflectors marking our route, even if we can’t see them through the fog until they’re right in front of us? To trust that the light will catch them at the very moment we need them? – not before, not after.