3 Life Lessons from Learning How to Drive

I earned my driving permit late in December, and it’s been a wild ride ever since. Actually, that’s exaggerating. It’s been a fairly smooth ride. Other than a few bumps in the road with changing lanes and maneuvering stop signs, things have been okay. I have improved since day one, though, and that excites me.

Learning to drive has been what I like to call a character-building process. I have learned many lessons about the world around me and about myself. Sarcasm aside (and I really will work on not being sarcastic right now, because I’ve recently been disillusioned about my ability to communicate satire through written English in my AP Comp class), driving is teaching me a handful of valuable lessons that I’m sure will serve me later in life. Here, I’ve condensed three of these lessons for your enjoyment:

• Humility

I know that in the big picture, I am only a little talented in a few areas. I realize, though, that I am blessed to live around people who give me lots of affirmation, and God has given me parents who have instilled in me a strong work ethic. Which is why, personally, I believe that if you work  hard enough at anything, you’ll get good at it. Sometimes I allow my previous successes in life to get to my head. Driving has freshly instilled in me a sense of humility at my inadequacy and how far I have to learn. I’m not sure why, but I kind of started driving with this persuasion in my head that since I’m a pretty level-headed teen, I would learn to drive swiftly and with ease. If only I had been more humble at the beginning. It was easy for me to criticize my parents for minor traffic infractions when I had just finished reading the California state Driver’s Manual, and I guess I assumed it would be easy to go about things better than them. Wrong. I mess up all over the place. I’m still not observant enough. I park crooked half the time. I have trouble changing lanes sometimes. Learning to drive has taught me not to overestimate my talent or my luck.

• I’m Average

While driving has taught me to be humble and listen to my parents (since I actually don’t know what I’m doing), it has also opened my eyes to what I’m capable of as a regular human being. I think teenagers have this tendency to mentally put themselves in a box all by themselves, as if they were completely unique from the rest of society and their peers, and I’ve learned that this is a complete myth. I am no more normal or weird than the rest of teenager-dom. Nevertheless, I still find myself catch myself occasionally putting myself in a different category than other kids. I’m not athletic or coordinated like most of the other kids at school, I’ll think. I’ll probably struggle to control a car more than others because of that. Well, it turns out that being deprived of the hand-eye coordination to play video games is not connected to one’s ability to steer or drive a car. Learning to drive has reminded me in a comforting sort of way of how average I really am. I’m not a prodigy with automobiles (though I like to joke about joining NASCAR someday), but I’m able to participate in an activity that most Americans do.

• Decision-Making

Driving has taught me the necessity of speedy decision-making. For instance, when you are coming out of a neighborhood and turning right into traffic on a large street, one must carefully gauge the speed of cars passing by and make a quick judgment about when to pull out when there’s a gap. Sounds easy, but if you’re like me, it’s a challenge to think fast enough to take action where seconds are the difference between safety and danger. Sounds dramatic; it kind of is. Driving is also teaching me to think ahead, and to think strategically–a major element of my mother’s teaching.

Do you have any fun/surprising/scary memories of learning how to drive or teaching your child to drive? What did you learn from that process?

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