Life is Like Driving A Manual Car
If you are a millennial, living in a first world country, you probably have never heard of a “manual” car, moreover a “clutch”. No a clutch is not a women’s handbag. It is a third pedal in a car where you need to press and depress to get the gear in. If all of this doesn’t make sense, google it and look at some car videos and you’ll know what I mean.
Once you have googled it or or the rest of you who are familiar with a “manual” car, I am here to tell you that I have been driving a six-speed manual car every day as part of my 40 minute commute to work. For someone who struggled to figure out how to smooth transition a gear using the clutch in the city voted as “most traffic in the world”, it was quite a brave feat. Growing up I had trouble trying to figure out how to get the clutch up smooth enough and with the right amount of gas pedal so I can get the car to move without a jolt. So telling myself (and my worried parents) that I was going to get a red coupe with a five speed manual Fiat Abarth for my daily commute car, took some courage and commitment.
The Abarth is a fun car though. There is no doubt about it. I got introduced to the car from one of Doug Demuro’s video and I was convinced that it was the right car for me because it was fun, affordable and unique. And now rare (On Sept 2019, Fiat announced they’ve discontinued the model). It definitely lives up to what everyone says about it. It is a small fuel efficient race car (yes believe it!) that growls at different speed levels and with a touch of the “Sport Mode” button becomes a rocket! I love it. The downshift, the the exhaust, the tight turns, makes every commute exciting.
One morning as I was driving and shifting gears (and I shift a lot because it’s only a small 4 cylinder engine), I realized one thing.
Life is very much like a daily drive.
Sometimes I shift it to the next level, sometimes I downshift it to a lower one. In the driving sense, it is done to get the car moving in the smoothest way while utilizing the engine not just as a means of acceleration but also as a means of braking (engine braking, look it up if you don’t know what this means).
In our life, the engine is our multi dimensional being. It is our physical, emotional and spiritual being. It is how we workout to keep healthy, what we eat, how we feel about ourselves and how we interact with the universe.
Don’t let any motivational speaker tell you that you need to always live your life in an upshift. That you need to always be positive, never be lazy, make no excuses, always be on the win and get no rest until you achieve success. That is the same as saying I am going to always keep driving in the high gears and let my engine push itself to meet the right amount of speed even though it’s struggling. If you are a manual car driver, you know what this feels like and how it sounds like.
Some times you need t downshift in order to allow the engine to work its way back up to the speed that you need it to be. In driving a manual car, downshifting will actually boost the car up in acceleration. In life, giving yourself a break, will also boost yourself back up to where you need to be.
Giving your self a break means, telling yourself it’s ok that you failed, it’s ok that you slept in, didn’t get a workout in, or that you missed an opportunity. Let it be an opportunity for you to relax, and take your time to feel and realize that this level down is a way life is trying to tell you that there are more opportunity, more time in a day for you to gain what you want. Life is abundant and you will never lose the chance to make up and shift up to the next level that you want to be.
The gearbox is there and it will always be there, just like the car. Your life, your intelligence, your physical, emotional and spiritual belief will never leave you. All you have to do is believe.
Believe in your self and believe that as long as you hit that pedal and navigate through the gears, you will always be unstoppable.
