A Plain Old Driven Life

A participant’s face visibly winced. The seminar was one of those change-your-life-for-the-better through “coaching” and other forms of manipulation deals. He had just been informed that he was living in ways that indicated a five-year-old version of himself was in the driver’s seat. Ouch. No one wants to think that an inexperienced, immature child is in control of the steering wheel of one’s life.

Nevertheless, that all we humans are driven cannot be disputed. Rick Warren has made a small fortune off the notion that we should be living “purpose-driven” lives. Fine. Whatever “purpose” means! It’s a wide driveway to negotiate! Most of us, it seems, live a plain old driven life and sometimes with the best versions of ourselves at the wheel and sometimes not. Our reasons for getting out of bed and moving about on this planet range from anxiety to zeal and everything in between. A peek into the future sets our anxiety in motion like little else while a glance around our house, our neighborhood, our family lights a fire under our passion for any number of things such as order, justice, and peace. Just saying. Bunches of us go through our days with a busyness driven by an insatiable desire to be liked by others of our kind. Ouch?

Yet there is much goodness in our plain old driven lives. We care. We help. We hope. We hold space. We turn things around. We engage. We do hard work like telling the truth. We set stuff in motion. We offer our shoulders. We fall to our knees. We pick up pieces. We round up little troops willing to march together onto battlefields metaphorical and oh so very real. The reasons we kick it into gear may be as varied as our social security numbers, but when the gears are fired up, they get things going and they get things done.

Sometimes we can’t identify a reason why we do what we do. We may have some sense that there’s something driving us, but it escapes our comprehension and defies definition. Who says we need one? We’re not gingerbread people living cookie cutter lives that all look just alike. Each and every plain old driven life has value and merit all its own. Still, it’s an interesting exercise if you choose to give it a go. Examine your motives. Probe your reasons. Take a gander at the driver’s seat to see who’s behind the wheel. It may not take long unless you are the type who likes to ruminate. You just might discover that your plain old driven life is really quite a marvel!