Well, it feels like today should be a celebration as it's a year since I passed my driving test, and thank God I'm still in one piece... Got one dent on the left-hand side from that time I got confused in a multi-storey car park, and have had one wheel changed because of that stupid moment when I fiddled around with the heating controls whilst doing probably about 50-60mph, but it's all part of the learning curve, we make mistakes and hopefully learn from them.
But where do the emotions come in, you are probably wondering...
Well, one of the things that was mentioned on the counselling course I'm doing is how negative emotions can be a bit like a red light on the dashboard, a sign to tell us that something isn't quite right, something under the surface needs attention. So many times in life, for one reason or another, we ignore these red lights. Have you ever driven a car with a red light on the dashboard, thinking, I haven't got time to stop and check this just now, I'm in a hurry, or I haven't got the money to spend on repairs, or, I'm not sure what this light means - we do this with our feelings, we have anger or tearfulness or anxiety or whatever coming up and we put a lid on the feelings because it's highly inconvenient at that moment to deal with them, we've got things to do, we're surrounded by people and what would they think, we've been taught boys don't cry or that it's wrong to show feelings in public or that feelings will go away if you ignore them or perhaps even that Christians should be joyful always and it's sinful to feel sad (so why does the Bible tell us that Jesus wept? and was he joyful when hanging on the cross? my role model showed feelings of sadness, of anger, of pain, and if it's good enough for him then it's good enough for me!) - so what am I trying to say here? Just this: burying emotions makes just as much sense as ignoring the red light on the dashboard. The problem will not go away, it will very probably get worse, the car won't go very well and at some point, when you're not expecting it and probably when it's extremely inconvenient, it will just stop.
Like I said, I had that stupid moment a few months ago when I bashed into the kerb because I'd been fiddling with the heating settings. I heard a loud noise but didn't understand what it meant. There were cars behind me and I felt I couldn't stop right there to check what happened. So I carried on - onto the M25, with a very spectacularly flat tyre. No, I didn't get very far. And it would have been a lot easier to wait for the AA man before I'd got onto the motorway. But I had felt I couldn't afford to stop at the time, it wasn't a convenient moment.
The truth is, there never is a convenient moment to deal with problems, but ignoring them doesn't work long-term.
