The rest of this post is more in tune with prayer and love: both of which are required in learning to drive a stick shift. Patience in both parties. Understanding and a will to learn from each other. This process could be a major speed bump in a relationship, and bring out big troubles in how you work with each other. It could certainly test a romantic relationship. It could be a great success, or a disastrous failure.
After weeks of Jared teasing that he was going to make me learn how to drive a manual transmission, and weeks of me forcefully declining, I woke up this morning willing to learn. It wasn't just going to be a test of my patience or my will to learn something I'd pushed away for so long, or Jared's ability to teach me something that comes easily to him, it'd be a test for US. How we work together. How we listen to each other. I was terrified.
We'd prayed together earlier in the day, in part for our patience levels, but we did not pray in particular regards to this journey. It could have turned very nasty, and this was the outcome I kept thinking about in my head. A red-faced Jared (not something that is usual for my even-keeled love), and me with a tear-streaked face, neither speaking to the other, him driving us back to his house in silence. That was my fear. By God's grace, it did not turn out that way.
We laid out some ground rules and expectations before setting of for our adventure, including a time limit (not a specific one, just "short"), as well as an important expectation: that I will not go away from today ready to drive a stick shift on the road, we will not keep going until I've got it. We talked about my past attempts to learn, which after the one with my dad where we both ended up very frustrated, and I ended up in tears (in a '70-something VW Beetle), were not true attempts on my part. My stubbornness had blocked my ability to learn in attempts after the first. In all reality it wasn't my first though - without my parents' (or my sister's) consent or knowledge, one of my sister's boyfriends had taught me in his late 80's Nissan Sentra when I was only 13 or 14, but without practice I'd lost that knowledge by the time my dad took me out a year or two later.
Somewhere in my mind, I knew that I had done it once (in a hilly neighborhood on Bull Mountain, by the way!), and I could do it again if I could get past my stubbornness, and have a patient teacher. So Jared and I climbed into his beloved Saab (which I also was scared to hurt - either by rolling into something or ruining the clutch), and started driving towards the community college. As we got closer, he thought that may be too hilly for our first outing, so we drove past it, into Lake Oswego, and down onto a road lined on each side with brick office buildings, each with a decent sized, mostly flat, parking lots. We pulled into one, my apprehension rising.
We switched places, talked for a bit about what would be going on (including setting another expectation for today's lesson: we would not be leaving Neutral or 1st gear, just practice starting and stopping), and got started. And stopped. Started again, and stopped. It was a while before I even stalled the car! My teacher was encouraging, his voice raising above his normal level only once (brake! as I was rolling backwards without realizing it), and even that wasn't cutting to me. I braked, looked at him, a little scared to see the look on his face, but my eyes weren't met with anger but a look of amusement, and we laughed. Each time I stalled, that became my reaction: laughter. It's good to be able to laugh at yourself. Bob Newhart probably said it best, "Laughter gives us distance. It allows us to step back from an event, deal with it and then move on."
Over all, it was a success, and I look forward to the next lesson, both in more ways than one.
No comments:
Post a Comment