Photo by Niklas Garnholz on Unsplash
That’s okay, because life has your back.
Do you remember those amusement park turnpike rides, where you drive a car around a course, often with a small child at the wheel? Alan Watts made an amusing analogy between one of those kiddie cars and our egoic sense of authorship in life. Here’s my own version of it.
The mind is a hyperactive driver
The rational mind as a driver is hypersensitive and exacting. It, acting on your behalf, holds the wheel making continuous corrections left and right to keep the car (you) on course. Hardly a moment passes with the mind happy about the current heading. The wheel must always be engaged to correct problematic deviations from the mind’s most recent assessment of how things ought to be.
Like a child in the driver’s seat of a fairground ride, the mind has good intentions as it fiddles and fidgets to drive with perfection. It means no harm. But its incessant problem-solving course corrections take their toll on the energy and maintenance fronts.
Life does the steering
The thing is, there’s a rail in the middle of the lane all the way around the track, and the car cannot deviate from that path. The child’s steering has no real bearing on the car’s travels. This steering wheel cannot override the guiding rail.
As at the fairground, so in reality. Life is an intelligent process that guides everything from the movement of celestial bodies to your digestion and the goose pimples on your skin. It is a single flow. You do not author a second, separate process. Life carries you just as the rail steers the child’s car. It only seems, from where you sit, like you are driving. If you realised life had the wheel, you’d save a lot of energy, wear and tear.
Life travels the course, regardless of its details
The child at the wheel may wish the car moved more quickly, may think the course should be more hilly, more winding, less bumpy or less polluted. Likewise, the mind is full of ideas and judgments about life. But the course doesn’t change in response to the child’s wishes, and life is life irrespective of the mind’s preferences.
Life travels the track. Life cares not whether the road is rough or smooth, hilly or flat, straight or winding. If anything, it seems to favour variety, with each characteristic and its opposite represented somewhere along the course.
In fact, life lays the rail, one moment at a time, in a process of unbounded creativity.
You are not the car; you are life.
Guess what: you are not the car travelling on the course, guided by the rail. You are the whole shebang — the car, the child, the rail, the course and the unfolding movement that is life.
For most of us, most of the time, the course is such that we feel we are only the car and our mind seems to be the driver. Really, we are the experiencing of the whole scene. The busy mind is part of life. Ups and downs, twists and turns in the course are part of life. The sense that we are driving is part of life. Our judgments about the course are part of life.
And we are life.
Enjoy the ride!