From the Passenger Seat: Lessons in Teaching Someone to Drive

Only occasionally is it terrifying.

I did not teach my friend the beauty of sticking your feet out the window. Some things you have to discover for yourself. Photo by Avinash Patel om Pexels.

When I was a nervous fifteen year old learning to drive, my father told me, “The slower you go, the more control you have.” As I give driving lessons to a young friend, I tell her what he told me amid those cornstalks on an empty Michigan road. Hearing myself repeat the same lesson, I think about how this works for so many things. In any high stakes situation, any fraught conversation, any time emotions flare high, it helps to go slowly. I could remember that a lot more.

By now, so much of driving is muscle memory for me, and I struggle to explain things like when to flip on the turn signal. My husband calls this process “why Michael Jordan can’t coach.” It’s hard to pick apart the key parts of what you know well.

I had forgotten that getting on the highway is so difficult. So many separate skills have to mesh together. It takes an act of optimism to speed up on the ramp, and then wait for the right time and space to merge. Signaling your intentions helps a lot. Then, you have to settle into your new speed. The whole process is a mini picture of every big change any of us has ever made.

Boo for parallel parking, the outdated art which nearly does us in. It can’t be explained, only felt, although YouTube videos help. How often are our lives held up by an outdated practice that can’t be explained, only felt? “Oh, that’s just the way we do it” sums up all the unwritten rules that narrow our lives.

My driving friend reminds that change is complex. The learning has to sink in with time, and the words don’t mean much without the experience. I could have saved myself years of heartache and tens of thousands of dollars by taking some advice, and yet I had to learn it all for myself. Thank you, Professor Experience, your lessons are the lasting ones, if expensive.

I watch the art of driving come together for my friend, in the same mysterious way that a child learns to read, or we learn to navigate office politics. I have to pick apart what I know, and she has to assemble what she knows. The teacher can only hand over the parts; everyone does their own assembly.

The big joy is that, as we drive, she talks about her family, her job, and her wise view of the world. Driving lessons give us the gift of a friendship, and I’ll be both sad and thrilled when she gets her license.

The book I can’t put down right now: Robert E. Lee and Me by Ty Seidule, a historian and a retired Brigadier General, who grew up as a proud Southerner. In this time when White Supremacy is on the rise again, he looks at how the South made plantations look romantic, and the Confederate cause look gallant.

He writes, “The names we use matter. By saying Union and Confederate, Blue and Gray, North and South, we lose the fundamental difference between the two sides. The United States fought against a rebel force that would not accept the results of a democratic election and chose armed rebellion. At Fort Sumter, South Carolina, and a dozen other U.S. Army posts, the secessionists fired on U.S. property and then seized it. The southern slaveholders were not fighting some foreign or lost-to-history army called the Union. The Confederacy fought the United States of America.

“The War of the Rebellion” is the most accurate description of the American Civil War. Frederick Douglass’s description has merit too: the “Slaveholders’ Rebellion.”"