Many action movies feature chase scenes or getaway scenes or driving scenes of some sort. Like Short Round with wooden blocks strapped to his feet in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Or the blind Whistler receiving verbal guidance navigating a van down a hill in Sneakers. Officer Jack Traven had to keep a bus moving at 50 MPH or more to prevent a bomb from exploding in the thriller Speed. Movies aside, many of us remember the video footage of O.J. Simpson in a white Ford Bronco weaving through the traffic on a California highway. Makes a big difference, doesn’t it, who’s in the driver’s seat?
A coach in the personal growth and development training program, Landmark Education, once asked a participant who was in the driver's seat of his life. The coach aggressively suggested that perhaps it was a five-year-old version of himself at the helm, fearful, immature, and emotionally battered, lacking the confidence to set a course and power through detours and lane changes. Interesting metaphor! It certainly gave the thirty-something participant something to consider. And it might give each one of us cause to ponder, who's in the driver's seat of our lives?
We all move around in this world with hidden and usually unidentified factors that come into play as our day unfolds. Maybe the emotional freight of an employer’s criticism or of a friend’s unfavorable interpretation weighs us down to the point that we feel puny and incapable of managing our lives. Perhaps a memory slams into our minds in the middle of a meeting or a concert or a routine trip to the grocery store and we hear putdowns in our heads we have spent decades trying to erase. Our egos bear the marks of being jabbed, whittled down, and bruised. When fearfulness or self-doubt takes hold, we might behave in ways we would not customarily act. It might be as if an awkward, hormone-hounded thirteen-year-old version of our selves has slipped into the driver’s seat.
Really now, what makes us do some of the things we do? Perhaps counselors and life coaches and therapists and listening friends can help us figure a few things out. But not every bit of it. Life goes on, nonetheless, and hopefully with a reasonable, fuller version of ourselves in the driver’s seat of our lives!
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