At the beginning of the summer, I started driving my car again. When I say my car, it’s important to note that said car is a trusty Bravada Oldsmobile passed down to me from my grandpa. It was made in the early 2000s and it sits up high, a nice perk for me. It’s the car that I’ve had since I got my license and it has always been familiar to me. My driving has been shaped by the way the car turns and the blind spots it has. Driving in anything else is odd. My dad’s car is too touchy, and my mom’s car has too many blind spots, but my car is just the right bowl of porridge.
Despite my car being just right for me, I didn’t take it to college for my first year away from home. So when I returned home I had to adjust to my car and to driving in general, but by the second week home I thought that I had a pretty good grip on it again. When my dad got into the car to drive us both somewhere, opting for my car because of the trunk space, he was appalled. “You’ve got no brakes,” he told me. “We need to make you an appointment.”
It’s easy to let the conditions of your life stay the same and simply adjust your movements to them, but it’s not always the smartest or safest way to go. There’s an example used for this kind of psychology. If you throw a frog into boiling water, the frog will jump out. But if you put a frog into a pot of water and gradually turn up the heat, the frog will stay in the pot until it is dead.
So we made an appointment, I got new rear brakes, and I kept driving.
An important part of life is knowing that you tend to be biased towards what is easy and familiar to you, whether it’s something simple like the brakes to your car or something as large as your relationships. It is easy to settle into a familiarity and go through the motions every day, letting the world wear down on you one left turn at a time and it’s even easier to miss your familiar surroundings deteriorate around you, if you let yourself adjust and camouflage along with them.
Let someone else drive your car, they may notice an odd clicking sound that you have gone selectively deaf to after months of it irritating you on your drive to work. Instead of turning up your radio, make an appointment for your car. Let someone else hear your thinking on the choices you make, or tell them how you feel about your job. Maybe they'll get you an interview for your dream job. Maybe they’ll realize before you do that your relationship is beginning to teeter into unhealthy territory.
You don’t get opportunities if you settle for your routine and you aren’t safe if you change your behaviors to fit deteriorating conditions. Check your brakes and give someone else the wheel once in a while, just to make sure everything is turning right.
