You know that you are getting older when you find yourself sitting in the passenger seat of your car and your 16 year old child is sitting in the driver’s seat. Yes, it seems like only yesterday that you were changing their nappy, and now you have handed them the keys to your pride and joy, and they are starting the engine.
There is a big yellow “L” sticker on both the front and back of the car for all to see. “L” means learner driver, but what you are really trying to say is “KEEP AWAY … GIVE US SPACE!”
It’s not an unreasonable thing to feel like you are simply not in control, even though the law (here in Australia anyway) says that you – the licenced driver in the car – are the one who is in really control of the vehicle, even though you are sitting in the passenger seat.
But that seems to be the way that life is these days. Everything is “automatic”.
Your camera, or if you are like me, your mobile phone camera. Use the default settings and get the default photo quality that tries to adjust for all possible scenarios – bright light, darkness, fluorescent lights, cloud, individuals or groups, portrait or landscape, white balance, blur correction, and red eye adjustment.
You put the car in drive, and let it figure out when to change gears based on load, fuel consumption, speed, driving behaviour.
You turn on the stereo and accept the standard equaliser settings. Maybe you choose “rock” or “classical” or “pop” pre-sets, but that’s about it.
No thinking required.
No manual adjustment performed. Default settings resulting in default quality … which admittedly is normally pretty good BTW.
But a few tweaks here and there – changing the focal length, or adjusting the shutter speed, changing to a lower gear to preempt a hill that’s coming up – and you can get better results.
I was recently on a trip down south in a hire car that I got into at the airport. Started it up, adjusted the seat, mirrors and radio volume, put it into drive, and headed off. I didn’t give it much thought really, as I figured that the “out of the box” (OOTB) settings would be fine.
A couple of days later there we were, driving along the motorway at 110km/h in the left-hand lane, cruise control on and minding our own business when a car overtakes us and pulls back over in front of us. Suddenly our vehicle started noticeably slowing down. It felt like something was holding it back and it just didn’t want to stay at the speed limit any longer.
Weird. Really weird actually. I couldn’t figure it out – the cruise control was definitely set for 110km/h but it refused to go that fast.
The car in front of us exited the highway and suddenly our car sped back up to the speed limit, quite happy again.
Weird. And then I figured it out. Adaptive cruise control, or whatever they call it. The car decided that we could not continue at 110km/h when there was a car in front of us, so it slowed us down.
I felt like I was not in control. To take back control I needed to turn off that automatic feature. A good feature BTW as it takes away the risk of running up the clacker of the car in front, but you realise that you have just given away one more bit of control over your safety and that of your passengers to a computer.
What’s next? Driverless cars where the only decision that I have to make is where I want to go, and when I want to leave.
So here’s the thing. Sometimes “automatic” is quite suitable and will provide satisfactory results for the situation at hand. That means that I can utilise my few remaining brain cells to think about other stuff.
Possibly more important stuff. Probably not.
Sometimes we (I) get worked up and upset because things aren’t going the way I want, but that could simply be because I have given all control and decision-making away to someone (or something) else.
Sometimes to get the optimal outcome, I need to make a conscious decision and conscious effort to take back control and be the master of my own destiny.
Does that mean that I will always get it right and arrive at a better outcome?
Nope.
Does that mean that I might learn and grow, develop new skills, better thought processes, and possibly learn something for next time that could give a better outcome down the track?
Absolutely!
Does that provide a greater level of personal satisfaction?
Yep!
Don’t let the world around you be frustrating because you feel like you have control. You probably have more control than you think, but you have left the world on “automatic”. Set it make to manual, make a few adjustments, and take back control.
#goinglimbic
#keepitfrontal