We should make the best use of our drive time spent with loved ones.
BONDING time or waste of time? It is what you make of it.
I recently picked up some lessons in life from a child – not my daughter, although she regales me daily with complex theories of the universe, but a five-year-old boy named Jack.
He’s a fictional character from the book, Room, by Emma Donoghue. He and his mother are trapped in Room against their will. Jack was born inside Room and his whole world exists within that 12 ft by 12 ft space.
His window to the outside world is provided by the programmes he watches on television. To him, everything in Room is real and anything outside is not.
Mother and son managed to escape from Room and were recuperating at a medical facility. One day, Jack was given a box of 120 crayons. He selected five and left the rest untouched, because he only ever had five and that was all he needed.
It was a self-check moment for me. If I could own many cars and luxury handbags, would I stop at what I need? If a distinction is made between need and want, I would end up with none, because cars and luxury handbags are wants, so I do not need any at all. It’s a sobering thought for this lover of cars and handbags. Jack observed that in Room, there was time for everything, but Outside, people are always complaining that they have no time. His explanation for this was that time gets spread very thin, likebutter, over the outside world, so there is only a little smear of time on each place.
I myself am guilty of this. Although my flexible work arrangement allows me to spend more time with my daughter now, I still often find myself telling her “later” or “I have work to do” when she asks me to play or to help her with something. On particularly busy days, I sometimes find it disruptive to take time out to fetchher from school.
But everything is a matter of perspective. To us, Room is a prison because we have seen the outside world. To Jack, Room is hisworld, his safe place.
Even after he and his mother managed to escape, there were instances when he wanted to return to Room because his bed, toys and everything familiar to himwere there.
Instead of seeing the school run or time spent on the road as a waste of time, I should see it as anopportunity to catch up on what happened at work or at school.
Come to think of it, a car is like Room on wheels. We should all learn to make the best use of time spent within the confines of the car cabin and make the duration of the journey count.
