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WHEN I DRIVE I WANT TO GO NOWHERE

A strange thing happens. Stopped at a traffic light in the middle of my busy daily urban rounds, I slowly slide out of... contact.
The busy four-way intersection shunts two opposing double-turn lanes in front of me. A freeway viaduct arches across the horizon a half block ahead. The furtive pedestrians, the stolid buildings, a stray wisp of paper clutter tumbling down the wake of traffic.

It all seizes up. Shrinks into a flat-screen diorama propped around my car. The scene beyond the windshield is meaningless. I am separated, and alone. Why am I here, wrapped in the middle of this flat, thin, featureless place?
Today I stood on the edge of a cliff and peered into a vast chasm filled with dark, starry, unknown expanses. We all visit this cliff sooner or later. We all wistfully contemplate the open door hovering in the air just beyond our reach there. We all shiver at the thought of leaping through that door, knowing it is the only way we can enter the beckoning mystery beyond.
For some the door is Death, and they come to it because it is time to be there. For some the door is Faith. They have arrived at the end of something small and the beginning of something great. For others it's a risk, an adventure, an opportunity, a promising ripple on the flat surface of the status quo. But all arrive at the cliff edge to be confronted with a stark fact. Only a leap from the safety of known, solid ground will carry them forward.
I have been to my cliff-edge often lately, always turning from it to trudge back to the familiar comforts of my own known ground. Today it was different. In the perspective of that emptily busy landscape suddenly gone flat I sensed, buried within it, hidden somewhere behind itmy door. It appeared before me. Before I had time to think, I leapt.
At that intersection I abruptly closed the doors on business as usual and left that place on a dead run, my soul on fire. With a skip and a jump and an open-armed, swan-diving howl I flew into the wild, surging flood of the universe at large, where the future is fecund with possibility and the present unfolds moment by moment with fathomless richness and depth and a delicious unpredictability.
What does it all mean? It means I have grown tired of doing the same old thing in the same old way. I have grown weary of worry, of the encroachment of aging in my body, of the daily grind for bed and breadan adventure I took on gladly when I was young, now marked by a sorrowful sameness, a shallow round in a narrow trench.
What do I want to do? I want to discover the undiscovered country on the other side of my door.
Here it is: I have suddenly leapt after a sojourn in a known and lately too-familiar domicile. It is time for floppy hats and loud shirts, for music in the desert and a Harley on the blacktop. It's time to hear rhythm and roar and silent, ringing harmonies, and no more the nattering twitcheries of a nagging internal voice always totting up the running score and incessantly informing me that I'm behind, that I'm losing the game.
When I drive I want to go nowhere, and it's got to be a big nowhere, full of earth and sky. Filled with time, lots of time, endless time stretching on and on and on forever. Time to meet the eyes of children and lovers and strangers and learn their knowings; time measured by an ancient drummer, time that flows and stretches and spills me softly into the universal sea of our common humanity.

Learn more about this author, Robert Griffith.
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