Counter the Drive

We watched the road from our porch. It was 28 degrees, dark and snowing, but we didn’t care. From our view we could easily see the main road that ran perpendicular to our street. It ran alongside a hill, at about 15 percent grade. The snow was starting to accumulate and it was posing a hazard to drivers on the road.

We live in Nashville, and snow happens, but not frequently enough for the general populace to fully grasp how to drive in it. Watching drivers struggle with the hill had drawn us to ignore the elements on the porch for a best view of human imperfection.

As we looked on a driver braked going down hill, and a little too heavily. The car skidded and slipped, coming to rest at the edge of the ditch, slightly stuck. We cheered and poured a glass of wine for ourselves. I loved sharing this moment with my wife.

A few minutes later, we saw two vehicles approach in the opposite direction, this time moving up hill. In front was a small sedan, behind it an eighteen wheeler. We could see the truck make room for itself, slowing on the flat stretch immediately before the incline began. It was instinctively clear that he knew what he was doing in this weather as he throttled the engine higher prior to beginning the ascent. But the small car in front slowed significantly as it began up the hill. This forced the truck to brake heavily, losing momentum, and with it, traction. The truck was now stuck on the hill, unable to continue. The smaller car, with its much lighter profile, was able to escape the hill and continue on.

He got away with one. The truck driver paid for the sedan driver’s poor judgment.

Driving on roads made slippery by ice and snow is counterintuitive that way. When you see a hill to climb, it makes you think: slow down, let’s take it easy. But without momentum, you lose traction. The proper approach is to apply more acceleration than you think is necessary, and let momentum carry you through.

This is like much of life, when you stop to think of it. A friend of mine served in Iraq in the army. He spoke of being trained to clear a building. They are taught to move slowly: slow is steady and steady is fast, goes the training. My intuition tells me they’d teach you to clear it rambo style, shooting a 50 cal machine gun from the hip, throwing grenades in every direction, screaming obscenities.

I am 40 and when I look at the last 15 years of my career I feel like I’ve approached it that way. The guys my age too. We entered our professional careers with guns blazing. We have filled every moment. It’s as if we always need more: more emails, more extracurrcicular events, more work projects to earn more promotions and more money so we can buy more stuff and fill even more minutes.

Our strategy isn’t getting us to where we set out to go. Instead of getting the most out of moments and true satisfaction from our life, we become increasingly frazzled and disconnected from the moments we are racing through. We’ve followed an intuition to increase production so we could maximize consumption, but maybe as with driving in snowy conditions, we should follow a counter intuition.

We should do less. We should stop things. Maybe we should follow rule #4: "Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work."

I used to think this was silly and antiquated. I mean, look at the places where they have blue laws. Do you want to be associated with that kind of a town? Is the resident there even remotely hip or cool or making a difference in the world?

Even if our hamster-wheel strategy isn’t working, I still want to be on top. I want to win and live the fullest life that is possible. But clearly, counter intuition makes sense. I don’t want to get stuck on the side of a hill.

There is a man, a tremendously influential leader. Two of his key lieutenants told him they wanted a promotion. He told them and the rest of his team:

“Whoever wants to be great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be slave of all.”

When I examine the motive for filling more and more of my life, I am not sure that service to others comes into that, and certainly not slavery. In fact, it is the opposite: I want it to be easy. But I keep digging and digging, making a bigger mess and becoming increasingly exhausted.

It’s time to follow the counterintuitive way and find the path to joy.