Just Drive

Sometimes there are mornings that I just want to get in the car and drive.

Nothing different than normal - get up, get ready, get in the car to drive to work - and then just keep going.

Where would I go with money in pocket and just driving?  Maybe back for a visit to Old Home.  The thought of driving across hours of empty landscape with just myself has a certain appeal to it right now.  Or maybe down to the coast - not so much for the water but just to sit on edge of the ocean and look out into the water and off into the horizon.

Why Drive?  There are just times where it feels like life - and the choices you have made in it - are simply overwhelming.  It is a form of information overload except that it is not just information.  It is sensation and emotion and a seemingly endless array of things that are crashing into your consciousness.  I assume that there are people that can deal with this sort of informational and sensational overload.  I cannot.

Driving (and because I commute I have done a lot of it in my time) allows me time to think and decompress in a way nothing else seems to.  Driving allows me to control the amount of input that I want: Music?  Conversation?  Or just the quiet hum of the car operating (I have been known to put earplugs in to dampen the sound of the car)?  I control it - based on the need I have at the moment.

And that need screams out to me now, every day.  To take a time away from the responsibilities, the needs, the demands, the wants, the confusion that seems to litter my mind and soul every day.

I need peace.  I need clarity.  I need the silence of the soul that allows life's demands to just fade away in the the long horizon of the road.

I need to drive.