Passionless Driving

I couldn’t tell if my taxi driver was insane, sadistic or had a lump of coal for a heart. Probably all three. I gripped my travel bag close to my chest as some form of imaginary airbag and hoped we were close to the hotel. I also prayed that the roads would magically clear of all people, carts, cars, motorcycles, loris, tuk-tuks, families, cows. Targets. The targets zip by at 40MPH, a seemingly impossible speed in our Suzuki Micro-Compact Somethingoranother. Thankfully my driver sucks at the game, because, since leaving the airport, he’s managed to not hit anything. Somehow.

I want to curl into a ball and yell, "What the hell are you doing??" But, being a good when-in-Rome type of traveler, I sit back and white-knuckle my way through the next 25 frightening minutes until I’m allowed the bliss of exiting the certain death trap. My driver doesn’t smile as I pay my fare, pick my stomach up off the ground and waddle through the Kathmandu haze to the hotel’s front doors.

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That was one of my first experiences careening through traffic in Kathmandu, Nepal. I’ve been back once and things haven’t changed. It’s still crazy busy. Everything seems like a near miss and chaos rules. But I’ve found it’s an organic type of chaos and there is a rhythm to it.  One key element in keeping it going seems like a state mandate for what I call "passionless driving".

Here in the USA it’s hard for us to adapt to how they drive in Nepal. We take every minor event on the road as a personal affront to our very nature. If someone comes too close to our car, maybe touching the thin, white line imaginarily dividing us, we talk to the other driver as if they care, "Whoa buddy! Watch what you’re doing!"  Buddy never answers because our windows are rolled up and NPR is telling us how ethanol will save the world. In extreme cases roadrage erupts when we take things way too personally.

If you drove with those same ideals of personal space, that the world is out to get you, in Nepal, your head would explode. There’s too much crowding going on, all the time. Close calls, bumper taps, horns and lights flashing, brushing by pedestrians. But here’s the rub; they don’t seem to take it personally. It’s just part of life, part of getting from A to B and for the taxis, part of making a wage.

On my last trip I rode in many taxis across Kathmandu, both day and night. I started getting accustomed to the fact that the way to survive, mentally, is to drive without passion. That guy that cut in front of you? He doesn’t hate you. He doesn’t even care about you. He’s just going the same direction. And it’s ok that he doesn’t care about you, really. For now he’s just an obstacle to get around. Once you get beyond him, he’s in the past. Again, not some evil villain and certainly not in your head any more, causing you your own grief.

I’ve tried applying some of this same mentality to my own driving. I make it impersonal when I’m on the road now (for the most part, I’m not perfect). The guy who is going slow in front of me when I want to go fast is not doing it because he hates me. Yelling at him really won’t help. Getting worked up won’t help. Not at all. When I pass by him I don’t glare or flip him off. As a matter of fact, when I pass people now I don’t even look over, because, honestly, it doesn’t matter. They are in the past, fading in my mirror.

To be sure, not caring about other drivers’ actions or imagined intentons in this sense doesn’t mean I hate te drivers. It doesn’t mean I think the cars are inhabited by zombies and I can just push them off the road. It means there’s nothing to get worked up about if I drive passionlessly. If no one hits me, and I hit no one, there’s nothing to get worked up about. Close calls are just that, close and nothing else. A moment in time, now in the past. It also doesn’t mean I’m a jerk when I drive because I’m not trying to get back at anyone for some ‘wrong’ they committed five miles ago.

I’m still courteous to other drivers, but I’m learning to drop what is typically considered the negative side of driving; taking everything so damn personally.