Making Good Time

“We want to make good time, but for us now this is measured with emphasis on “good” rather than “time” and when you make that shift in emphasis the whole approach changes.”
      –Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

By Norris Frederick
Photos by Robin Jonathan Deutsch on Unsplash

On this early-spring morning, I’m driving from my Charlotte home to Salisbury for a day visit with my brother Charlie. I’m taking the back roads, avoiding the University area to arrive on US-49 North.

US-49 can be congested, but at this hour there’s little traffic, so I cruise along enjoying the morning, sipping my coffee as I think or just am aware of my surroundings, thoughts, and feelings.

I am relieved at leaving the city and its congestion, and I also am anticipating my turn due north that’s coming up.

I make a left turn at the old school with the broken gym windows, with the Circle K on my right, and drive slowly down a street with small and neat one-story houses.  There’s a lot to see: a brick house on a hill which displays metal artwork in the yard; some stunning azaleas in another yard, and as I leave town there’s a house on the right with a heavily shaded yard surrounded by a stockade fence, leading my mind on a path of association to drug dealers or survivalists.

Now I’m in the country for the next 15 miles. In summer I will see acres and acres of corn.  Today soybeans are in abundance, adding nitrogen to the soil that will bring healthy growth to the corn when it is planted.  A natural harmony discovered by scientific investigation, crop rotation was encouraged in the South a century ago by the U. S. government, increasing yield and income to farmers.

A shorts-clad woman has been mowing her grass and is pausing to peer into the mailbox.

One house has created a display of the past: an old Esso sign on a pole, and two non-working gas tanks.  Shortly past that is a yard with a pink four-foot-high doll house.

I’m glad I’m not on the interstate highway with absolutely no scenery, thick with cars at the 70-mph posted limits, which numerous drivers regard as a mere recommendation as they weave between lanes at 85 mph.

I pass by a historic Lutheran rock church and its graveyard, with tombstones speaking for their silent residents.

I enter the small town of Faith, which in its center has a speed limit of 20 mph.  I can’t help but smile as I see the sign for “Faith Internal Medicine” and wonder whether they see the need for medical equipment in the building.

Finally, I’m back on a heavily travelled boulevard in Salisbury, and I know I’m back in a city.

Maps for Travelling

If I use Google maps to tell me how to get from Charlotte to Salisbury, it quickly leads me to I-85.  The interstate is faster, but the question I want to ask is whether it is better.

Back in the day before GPS systems, I would open my map of North Carolina, not the one of the Southeast made by AAA or an oil company, which presents only major and some secondary roads, but the detailed state map distributed by the NC Department of Motor Vehicles.  Every road in the state, no matter how small, would be on that map.

I would spread it flat on a table, folding it so I could focus on whichever part of the state I wanted to travel. I would look at routes between where I was and where I wanted to go and would run my finger along the path of roads that look promising.  This took some time, but I enjoyed the feeling of planning, the tactile sensations of the map, and the result was well worth my time.

I don’t know whether it was due to reading the transcendentalists Emerson and Thoreau, or just part of my temperament, but I’ve always been drawn to the road less travelled. 

 When the book Blue Highways [public library], by William Least Heat Moon, came out in 1982, I was immediately drawn to both the title and the name of the author.  He writes in the book’s preface, “On the old highway maps of America, the major routes were red and the back roads blue. Now even the colors are changing. But in those brevities just before dawn and a little after dusk — times neither day nor night –the old roads return to the sky some of its color. Then, in truth, they carry a mysterious cast of blue, and it’s that time when the pull of the blue highway is strongest, when the open road is a beckoning, a strangeness, a place where a man can lose himself.”

Maps for Living Well

 Least Heat Moon’s keen observations and awareness point not only to a map for travelling, but to a journey of living.  (For more on the idea of journey, see this previous post.)

In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance [public library] (1974), Robert Pirsig meditates on a motorcycle trip he, his son, and two friends take from Minneapolis to San Francisco, also on back roads.  I’ve read this book a half-dozen times.  One passage of many that have stuck with me is,

 “Secondary roads are preferred. Paved county roads are the best, state highways are next.  Freeways are the worst.

 

We want to make good time, but for us now this is measured with emphasis on “good” rather than “time” and when you make that shift in emphasis the whole approach changes.”

 (For more on Pirsig and Zen Buddhism, read my post “Fixin’ Things.”)

This is good advice not only for traveling by car or motorcycle, but for living.

“Faster is better” is a dominant assumption of our culture: in food, package delivery, computer and phone download times.  This combines well with “newer is better,” driving us to get the very latest version of our cell phones.  All this works very well for corporations.

“Do what is popular” is a dominant assumption of all cultures.  Add that to the two assumptions above, and we have a map for living that is the equivalent of the freeways, the interstate.

But I find much more truth in Thoreau’s statement,

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived….. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.” (Walden, or Life in the Woods, 1854 – public library)

Following Thoreau’s words metaphorically puts you on the secondary roads, the paved roads, the blue highways.

For me to live fully, I must be conscious of my life, and it must be MY life, not some pre-programmed set of experiences created by social influences and technology.

If we don’t question – think critically about — these assumptions, we aren’t fully living, because to be a human being involves making considered decisions on how each of us should live.  But neither should we blindly accept the opposite of a cultural assumption.  There are times when faster is better, considering the distance of the drive, safety, and/or the need to get there by a certain time.

It’s one thing to think about challenging these assumptions, quite another to live according to another set of beliefs.

You can challenge “faster is better” not only when driving, but in any activity in which you’re engaged. “Engaged” is the key word.

I once read an article about a Zen approach to washing dishes.  Even if you have a dishwasher, at least from time-to-time wash dishes by hand.  Fill the sink with hot water and add detergent.  Turn off the television or the music. Feel the warmth of the water, how good it feels.

The Zen advice:  “When washing dishes, just wash dishes.”

I work to be aware.  Be engaged.  Just do what I’m doing. Live my life fully, so that “not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

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