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?

This phenomenon inspires me to be a better blogger. I know that what I’ve written here hasn’t been spectacular, but I know that I have been given some talent in writing. I also know that I’ve been tossing around in my head the idea of doing some kind of writing major–journalism or something along those lines–in the future. That remains to be seen. Regardless, I believe that I can be a better writer. I also believe that daily practice is key in mastering the art of writing.

Somewhere on my list of Ambitions-and-Things-I-Want-to-Do-Before-I-Die is this desire I have had to become a faithful, creative, and inspiring writer for some sort of periodical (most likely a blog). I have been inspired by the likes of the Mahaney Women, Chase McFadden, Renée Schuls-Jacobson, and countless others. Why not work on achieving that goal? It’s going to take hard work anyway, so I might as well start early.

My problem is that I get easily burnt out when I’m writing something that other people will read, even when it’s short and un-serious, because I tend to be a perfectionist. I think blogging more consistently will help with this problem, because, as I gathered  the other day from thinking about this superlatively fascinating article by Joshua Foer in the New York Times, one of the best ways to improve in a skill is to work at it faster than usual and allow yourself to make mistakes so that your brain can figure out its weak points and overcome them. Cool, and I think this might be a good way to work that out.

Another problem is that I am typically unread on major current events and most other topics, since I am young and absorbed with my own life. I also have a cluttered mind filled with many undeveloped/developing thoughts. Consistently blogging would help to solve this problem by forcing me to take time to get an idea of what’s going on in the world around me and synthesize some of that into my own opinion. It’s too easy to just have knowledge and not form an opinion on it. Blogging would force me to think quickly and develop the ideas in my head into coherent, complete thoughts.

With that, I will make a commitment: for the time being, I shall write one complete blog post every week. Do you have any ideas regarding what I should write about?