Drive

Climb into 3 tons of steel, start a small explosion using electricity and gasoline and lumber onto strips of asphalt with other metallic boulders hurtling in different directions at about 73 feet per second all while navigating through a maze of lights, signs and increasingly blind pedestrians using bits of rubber and reflective glass. However this seemingly death defying act of sheer madness is orchestrated on a daily basis by hundreds of millions of people and it's actually quite enjoyable as long you're not driving near any taxis or Chinatowns.



Yet people are far more terrified of necrotizing fasciitis and paying for health insurance than from getting into their cars every morning. That's very understandable because driving is fun whereas flesh eating bacteria and deductible payments are not. What is it about driving that is so darn enjoyable anyhow?



Personally I always feel a soothing sense of tranquility on long drives. Whether it's a familiar trek down the Garden State Parkway or a quick run from McCarran onto 1-15, something about having a destination and the wherewithal to reach it provides a small sense of fulfillment and that ever elusive illusion of control.



It isn't always easy. There are plenty of obstacles that stand in the way of a comfortable drive; traffic jams, traffic cops, cabbies, texters, mobile makeup artists, state troopers, BICYCLISTS, truckers, soccer moms, drunk dads, minivans, fallen trees, falling rocks, carjackers, moon walkers, panhandlers and squeegee men. Then there's the cost of gas, cost of cars, cost of tolls, cost of insurance, cost of not having insurance, cost of parking, cost of parking tickets, cost of fighting ticket, and the cost of taxes to maintain the unions that "maintain" the endless roads, byways and highways.



Despite all of this crap, the simple joy of driving still emerges victorious.



Life is hard. Taking control of your life and deciding what you're going to do with it is even harder. The odds against success are enormous, but difficulty is not to be confused with impossibility. Think about the odds you had to beat to be sitting here right now reading the miscellaneous thoughts streaming from my semi-consciousness.



Your odds of just being born were about 1 in 390 to 412 million multiplied by approximately 1 in 800 depending on your father's virility. So just to enter this world was about a 1 in 320,000,000,000. Now multiply that by the odds of being a facebook user (1 in 12) that reads my notes (205 out of 500,000,000) Very small is a gross exaggeration of how unlikely this whole endeavor is.



So now we know why Han Solo didn't much care for odds.



Chances are you won't succeed, but then again the chances were that you should never have existed to begin with. So what are you waiting for? Get out there and get some drive!