Driving up walls

I do not know how to drive a cycle.

I'm certain that a few minutes have lapsed since your reading the previous sentence; time that you, dear reader, would have spent judging me for being unequipped with a skill so elementary. Now that the statement has served it's purpose of drawing your eye to this piece, I must abandon dwelling on it any further lest I run the risk of diving into an abyss of regret.

I sat down to write today because lately, I have been wondering whether there is such a thing as too much too fast. You see, I am fundamentally a restless person- not because I constantly find myself fidgeting or twitching, but because I perceive ever so often, that in my mind there is an incessant sense of urgency. 'An urgency towards what?' you may ask and not unlike you, this is a question I have posed to myself as well. However, I have never quite been able to construct a response, perhaps because my perspective is lacking in a certain detachment from the subject that might be required in order to reach a satisfactory conclusion.

This mental restlessness affects the way I function. It has always driven me towards wanting to be productive every waking moment of the day but on the flip side, has also made me realise recently that I can almost never have a lazy day. A day spent doing nothing qualifies as nothing short of a nightmare in my mind. Given this context, you can imagine just how scandalised I would have been when I came to know that a friend of mine had spent much of his summer doing nothing. As you might have expected, I went on to explain my theory of productivity to him and the obvious response was nothing short of vehement disagreement based entirely on the argument that I couldn't trivialise the art of doing nothing simply because I had not done it myself.

The irony did not escape me for I could not win the debate unless I declared that only because I have spent days doing nothing and have had extremely productive days, I know that I prefer one over the other; but by doing so, I would be in direct contradiction of the basic tenet of my argument that I have never had a lazy day. (quite evidently, I have been reading Joseph Heller's mordant classic Catch-22) Nevertheless, I decided to quell my ego and therein lies the story behind my first lazy day.

I cannot tell you what a relief it was because it was not. At least that's what I thought I would tell him the next day.

Unfortunately I could not bring myself to lie and that drove me a little mad.

It put a lot of things into perspective because for the first time I acknowledged that there really is such a thing as too much too fast. The break neck pace at which I was going about my existence, pursuing whatever it is that caught my fancy- be it a book, a great piece of music, a movie or even something on the silver screen- was not sustainable. I had to be slowed down every now and then. It reached a point where I had enrolled myself for volunteering, joined a gym and signed up for driving classes during a mini two month vacation last summer. Don't get me wrong, I was genuinely interested in doing these things, but I realised that if wanted to be able to continue doing them, I would have to forcibly control the dizzying rate at which I was functioning.

To do or not to do, that was the question.....

'What to do or what not to do'- an altered version of an already altered oft-repeated quote was the only thing that came to mind during the drivers' license test that was the culmination of eighteen long days of attending those aforementioned classes.  It's not hard to believe me when I say that I wanted to learn to drive a car in all earnestness because of the handicap with which I began writing this piece. I was determined to ace the test and had even practised twice a day for an entire month in a vehicle with our patient driver.

However, when I reached the venue where the test was scheduled to take place, I was taken aback because all I had to do was drive down a narrow lane, turn and get back to square one.

I felt deceived.

Had I practised so much only to be subjected to a test so easy? Diffidence turned into confidence and eventually complacence.

However, when I began driving, I realised that the vehicle was far too big for the lane and turning it to come back to the starting point would prove to be an exercise in physical and mental dexterity. The fact that an elderly gentleman who was getting his license renewed was right behind me did not help and put me into panic mode. The only person who could possibly come to my rescue now, was the only person I could not contact because I realised that our driver who had accompanied me that morning was directly in the line of sight of the driving inspector.

To this day, it remains a mystery as to how he sensed my incompetence and managed to manoeuvre his way over to me, quite possibly by camouflaging himself amidst the bushes alongside the edge of the lane. Once I spotted him in the rear view mirror, I furiously drove further down the lane until a bylane came to my rescue and I turned into it. In the secrecy of that little bylane, he swapped places with me, deftly swerved the car around so that all I had to do was drive straight down to the starting point.

To this day, I don't know how I managed to get away with this. Many months have passed since, and thankfully, now, I only drive people up walls; not cars.