Learning to Drive

Learning to drive this year has been an enjoyable experience. It’s perhaps the first time in a long time that I’ve learned something “from scratch” and it’s been fun and fascinating to see how the mind absorbs each stage of the process.

Doing anything enough times over a long enough period becomes rote eventually. So much so that you often come to forget how to not know a thing, or how to not do a thing when a corresponding situation arises.

It’s something we easily forget; the time before we knew. Looking at markings on a page without reading the words they form becomes an oddly difficult task, should we ever think to try it, once a person has learned to read.

Learning to drive over a relatively short and recent period, I can still recall what it was like to struggle with the gears or when 10 km an hour through the empty shopping centre car park felt like quite enough for one day.

Slowly I have felt, and still feel, these actions and experiences becoming more learned, more a part of me, as though I’ve been pulling at those teaching and dragging them in. Then grabbing them again as they try to escape. And again. And again, retaining a little more each time, until they finally find a home with me.

And then I don’t change the gears any more, insofar as I no longer need to think too much about it. Once I was required to pay attention, putting this foot on that pedal then moving this stick like this or like that. Now my foot moves the peddle and my hand moves the stick and I’ve barely noticed it happening, certainly not the particulars, except to know that it should and it will and it has been done. Now I am free to do other things, like looking out for where we’re going.