Rush hour used to be something I avoided. I scheduled every working day I’ve ever driven in the past 25 years, to have a traffic-free morning commute.
The past five years however I have been forced to sit in rush hour in the evenings to drive my daughters to their fencing school. We leave our house in Langley and in a mere two hours, we arrive in Seattle at the fencing school, with barely a second to spare.
Much to my dismay, I have found sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic to be one of the most relaxing parts of the day.
I have intimate discussions with my daughters that we would never have had if they could have escaped the car. Trapped with me in traffic, they are forced to either endure my lectures or start a more interesting conversation. Thankfully, they always come up with conversation. I learn more in the car than I ever hear at the dinner table.
We do the dinner table thing. I am a big fan of family dinners. Not just because the research shows that kids who have family dinners do better in school and are less likely to do drugs. I do family dinners because I love sitting down each night with my family.
But sometimes these dinners are short. There are school events in the evenings, volunteer commitments, homework and whatever else. It just seems like another part of the day gets started after dinner.
The after-dinner day is why sitting in traffic has become so pleasurable. The traffic I sit in on the way to fencing school creates a long pause. I really can’t move the laundry along, or finish one project and start another from the front seat of the car. In fact, when I feel too busy at home on weekends, I just go into the garage and settle myself into the front seat for a moment of Zen.
I do realize that some people are missing out on this last frontier by outfitting their cars with numerous features and distractions. I say, resist the urge to make your car a rolling entertainment center. Let one place be a sanctuary.
Sitting in traffic may be the last sanctuary for peace in this culture.
I know as we go green, maybe we’ll all be saved from the bliss of traffic. Greater moments of peace await us on buses and trains. This could be the next marketing strategy for Sound Transit. Forget the importance of going green. Gas prices at $3 still didn’t drag folks out of their sport utility vehicles. Try selling people on sleep. A time-out, a nap, now that has appeal.
If marketing a nap takes off, we’ll have to rename rush hour. Of course, it will leave one little problem. We’ll have to figure out where all our intimate conversations will take place if we’re not holed up in the car.
My two-hour commutes to fencing school are coming to an end this year, and I seriously can’t think of anything that will measure up to this time together when my daughters leave for college.
It just strikes me that the car has been a sweet little nest.
Sarri Gilman is a freelance writer living on Whidbey Island. Her column on living with meaning and purpose runs every other Tuesday in The Herald. She is a therapist, a wife and a mother and has founded two nonprofit organizations to serve homeless children. You can e-mail her at features@ heraldnet.com.
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