Having a hard time getting in gear on this Friday morning. I am still holding my breath. It happens when you feel like you have averted a disaster. You are driving along in dense fog and heavy traffic, poor conditions everyone knows. You can’t really slow down when the average speed of those around you dictates relative safety. Even if logic and law states otherwise, you go 10 mph over the posted speed limits knowing that you risk life and limb otherwise. Life in general follows these same parameters. We know we should slow down. We know it is foolish, unwise and reckless to do as we are doing. Yet….how do you change if the amalgam of life around you dictates the road rules?
You can play Intimidator and tap the guy on your front bumper and provoke a crash, a spin out or a pile up. You gamble triggering this hoping you can sling shot through without getting snared. It is a high risk gamble and it doesn’t always work. When it fails, it can be deadly.
You can deliberately slow down and drive the EXACT speed limit or worse, slow to below the speed limit. This infuriates and enrages EVERYONE. It can be equally as dangerous. But, eventually, the pack passes you and you are free to proceed at your own pace.
But sometimes, you have no choice but to keep pace. You can hear the knocking and the shimmy. You know you need a pit stop. You know that if you don’t get one soon, you’re gonna have chaos to manage. But for the time being…you just keep pace. You keep pace and you wait for an opening. You wait for the news to arrive and once it arrives you can decide how to proceed. Do you gun it and plow out of the pack? Do you jerk to the right or left and crash those that have you boxed in? Do you flick a bird at the spectators who gawk from the bleachers waiting for the pile up? They are fans of the catastrophe even when their jersey is emblazoned with a specific number or team. Screw them. You don’t need fans for your clusterfuck. Or do you finally just slam on the breaks and let the pack swerve around you so you can dive into the pitstop, knowing that you’ll never make it around another lap? What if your pit crew has walked off? What if there are no spare parts? What if that shimmy can’t be fixed?
Then you call it a day and pack up. There is always another race to run. But by my calculations, we’re about out of fuel, the tires are paper thin, the engine is running hot and it’s firing on three cylinders. Time for a re-engineering. This is way past pit stop fixing. I just gotta get through this day. Get the word and get home.