You Can’t Coast Through Life

When I wrote the previous post, We Are Singing One Song Together, I had intended to write about what I learned from receiving a speeding ticket.  I guess part of what I learned is that “there are no mistakes, only opportunities to improve.”  The other thing I learned is that you can’t coast through life–literally.  You see, right before the flashing red and blue lights turned on and I received my ticket, I noticed my speedometer.  I had just come off the exit and was heading downhill into Roanoke.  When I looked down I saw that I was almost going 60 mph.  I didn’t have my foot on the gas and was just coasting downhill. My thought was, “I guess this is the natural speed of gravity. This should be the speed limit for this area.  I guess I’ll just coast until I see the speed limit sign.”  Seconds later, I saw that the speed limit was 45 mph.  Immediately I started to slow down, but not before the police officer who was parked under the sign clocked me and proceeded to come after me.  Long story short is that I got a ticket. 

As a Virginian, I know that we are the state of speed traps, so I was not surprised that there was a police officer posted by the first speed limit sign at the bottom of a downward slope.  In fact the first ticket I ever received at age 17 was in the same situation.  So all I could do was accept the ticket and try to learn from it.  So what did I learn? Well like I said, “we can’t coast through life.”  That’s what I was doing in that moment–coasting. Sometimes we have to slow down.  Sometimes we have to speed up. Because that is what life with others seems to require. Not all of us move at the same pace.  Even though I really didn’t know the speed limit, from the point of view of the officer, it was cut and dry. I was going faster than the sign said I was supposed to.  When the signs say slow down  we are expected to slow down. And who likes driving behind someone going slow in  fast lane. Life in relationships is a life of continual adjustment and readjustment. We all live with this expectation whether consciously or not.  And when we don’t adjust when it is expected there is an “offness” that we feel.  Sometimes we are the ones that create the “offness” and sometimes its those with whom we relate.  But, because we are all part of one system–One Song— it doesn’t matter who “started it”.  It’s up to everyone to readjust when things are off.  And I think the officer felt off about giving me the ticket.

When he wrote up my ticket, he actually compassionately took off 5 miles to lower the price of the ticket.  That was nice of him, but I also got the sense that he didn’t want to give me the ticket at all.  And that gave me something to consider as well.  As he was in his car looking up my license, I prayed for him and us and the whole situation. I didn’t pray that I didn’t get the ticket (even though maybe I should have).  I prayed that we both receive everything this encounter came to teach us. When he saw our family, I could tell that he felt awkward.  Here I was in a rental car six miles from my destination after driving four hours from the Charlotte airport–all of which he I told him when he asked the customary questions. My little daughter is crying in the backseat and asking, “Are you taking my daddy?”  Maybe I was projecting onto him, but I felt like he wanted to just tell me to slow down and let me go.  But he seemed trapped by what he was “supposed to do”.  So as a gesture he took off a few miles.  That’s how I took it.  And then it hit me that him giving me that ticket was a kind of coasting as well.  When he stopped me he was actually being carried by a metaphor of gravity–for the law of man is an attempt to mimic the law of nature.  He was pulled by the law to stop me.  It was almost natural for him to do.  But the fact that he wrote the ticket as 5 miles less when that is contrary to the “law” suggests to me that in my case he knew that I was not intentionally breaking the law and I think in his own way, he was trying to “put on his breaks” to slow down the momentum of writing that ticket.  But like me, he was caught in the pull and wasn’t able to break in time.  Does that make sense?

As you can see, I am still processing this experience.  This might sound backwards, but I actually feel like I could have helped the officer not give me the ticket by either asking him or by apologizing for going too fast.  The fact that I didn’t know was not going to help him use his power to choose. I think he wrote it out of compulsion even when he didn’t want to. In my opinion, I think he needed something to empower him to make the decision he wanted to make and in some ways I left him hanging by deferring. 

Ultimately I don’t think I lost anything by receiving the ticket.  If I just take the lessons of “slowing down” and “no coasting through life” to heart, I have gained a fortune for the $120 investment to Roanoke.  In the One Song of the Universe, the officer and I both played our parts.  That’s how it is.  The reverberations of our encounter will continue to go out for eternity.  If I choose to, I can revisit it and continue to learn from it until I align with everything it came to teach me.  That’s how it is with every experience we have in life.  They all come to make us better.  Nothing takes away from us.  Everything adds.  But it is up to us what we receive.

Holy Snowboarding Lessons Black Man

Whenever I go snowboarding, I learn a whole bunch of life lessons. I try my best to watch my thoughts so I can stay aware of the divisive ego exerting itself. Usually at some point on the mountain I become aware of how few, if any, black people are up there. I usually become aware as soon as I see another black person. But after being in New England for as long as I have, that passes pretty quickly. I’m pretty used to that by now. Next I might think about my own snowboarding skills compared to others. That too passes quickly. Then I go on to wanting slower people to get out of my way. But then I remember that I just started a few years ago, so I’m sure that there are people who think the same thing about me. So I laugh at my arrogance and move on.

My biggest lesson up until today has been, “Wherever my eyes go, I go.” Earlier this season I realized that my body responded directly to my gaze as I sailed down the mountain. As soon as I looked too far ahead or paid attention to whatever others were doing too much, I usually ended up eating snow. This lesson has been a great way of checking myself in all areas of my life. Whenever I catch myself ego tripping I say, “Wherever my eyes go, I go.” It falls in line with Jesus’s eye parables such as the eye being the lamp of the body, getting the log out of our own eyes before trying to get the speck out of someone else’s, and keeping our eye single i.e. seeing Oneness.

The lesson I picked up today, which I may be working on for a while was the awareness that I am much more capable of staying vertical down the mountain when no one I care about is near me. My wife boards and my daughter skis. I can be flying down the mountain loving life, but if I get close to them, I start tensing up. Especially with my daughter. I get so nervous that she is going to fall that I usually fall myself. And if my wife slows down or tries to say anything to me as I pass her, I usually either get bothered or if I try to engage her, I end up with ice in my underwear. However, if I just act like they are just random people on their own journey, I’m fine.

What does that say to you? Well to me it says two things. One is that, on some level, they really are on their own journey. Sometimes in certain relationships, the lines of where we begin and others end gets blurry. Basically respecting the being of our loved ones can get difficult when we care “too much”. Even when the others are our partners or our children, their first relationship is between them and God. For this reason, there are places that God is taking them that we just can’t go. The second thing was that I realized was that I have a hard time slowing down for others. In many areas in life I can just set my intention and just go. Once I do that I don’t like looking back. I don’t want to slow down for anything or anyone. However, relationships require that sometimes. I guess that’s what Jesus modeled when he did the human thing. Who knows? Maybe I’ll ask him next time I go to the mountaintop.

Nowhere To Go? Turn Right

Might as well go this way.

Isn’t there some saying that goes something like, “If you don’t know where you’re going, then any road will take you there”?  Well that was the road my family took yesterday when we did a little family outing.  My family just wanted to leave the house.  So after talking for a while about our options and coming up empty handed, we just grabbed the dog, got in the car, and turned right.  We just kept going until I suggested we take another right which put us in the center of a quaint New England town where the “well to dos” live.  My daughter and I walked around for about twenty minutes while my wife looked at clothes in a store.  Then we got back in the car and drove around aimlessly until two of us had to pee and all of us were frustrated because we didn’t know where we were or what we wanted to do.  That’s when that saying popped in my head.  It’s so true.  Now I’m thinking of a new saying.  “If you don’t know where you want to go, why don’t you just stay where you are?”

That being said, we did get a few signs that wherever we were, it was the right place to be at the time.  Before we left the house, we were trying to come up with a name for a blog my wife could start.  I kept trying to think of the word “gypsy” but couldn’t remember it. All of a sudden it popped in our heads at the same time. “GYPSY” we both called out.  Immediately it came to me that I should pay attention to that word.  Well guess what happened.  When we made that second right turn into that town we saw a huge banner for an upcoming play called “GYPSY”.  That was the first sign.  An hour or two later, I was starting to go into one of my moods that I go into right after I leave huge grocery stores with outrageous prepared food sections (where do all of the left overs go?) or huge department store filled with stuff. We went to both and I was feeling the clouds coming when guess what I saw again–the word “GYPSY”  on a sign on the side of the road that couldn’t have been more than 17″ X 12″.  A few miles down the road, we stopped at Trader Joe’s (my favorite grocer).  They were doing a wine tasting.  All of a sudden I thought I should go have a taste, but in reality I had no desire.  Still I went.  Guess what the wine was called.  I’m not even going to tell you.  So that was three.  I bought the wine just in case it was the whole reason for us making that right in the first place.  Could be.  Whether it was or not, you have to admit it is pretty cool to see signs that show us that even when we don’t know why we are where we are it still just might be the “right” place to be.