This time of year a lot of emphasis is put on good will to others. Sharing love with family and friends, supporting those less fortunate and giving what we can to charities. Love, support and giving are all truly important values and we, as a society, and as humankind, benefit greatly by applying these to our day-to-day lives throughout the year. How can we live these values while driving? How do we show love to those drivers who don’t appear to care about others? It all comes down to our thoughts. If we watch our minds and notice our judgements of...

18 December, 2018 /

The Christmas shopping period is well underway as people flock to the streets to buy gifts for their loved ones. I’ve started to notice an increase in the number of cars in the city centre during the evenings, with long queues stretching up the motorway. But what does this volume of traffic do to us? One effect is a sense of running behind, leading us to feel like we need to rush. We see this in the shops as people hurry to get around the crowds and finish as quickly as possible. We also see this on the roads before and...

10 December, 2018 /

Every year advent calendars help us countdown the days until Christmas. It’s a fun way to look forward to the holidays for children and adults alike. However, this countdown mentality isn’t just a festive activity, but a daily occurrence throughout our lives, with watches, alarms, countdown apps and calendar reminders. How often do you find yourself counting down the days to a holiday, the hours to the end of a working day, or the minutes leading up to an important call or meeting? Clock watching is systemic in our culture with an emphasis on goals, deadlines and punctuality. There is...

03 December, 2018 /

Moving into the winter months in the UK it’s likely we’ll have some wet and windy weather. This may not make for the most ideal driving conditions as it becomes harder to see and adds more things to think about, sometimes in an already busy situation. The wipers wave about like an impatient child trying to get your attention and the wind buffers the car and hurries people across the road in front of you at the last moment. It’s starting to look a lot like Christmas shopping in the city centre where people are darting around and there is...

27 November, 2018 /

As the days get shorter, more and more of our daily commute is in darkness. For some who work their days in an office or warehouse this is less than appealing. Leaving home in the dark, working the day under artificial light, and then driving home in the dark. However, it is important to remember that these darker days are a necessary part of life. They remind us that we cannot have the light without the dark, the good times without the bad, highs without lows. Everything is defined not only by what it is but also by what it is...

15 November, 2018 /

When we drive we are quite often focused on our need to be somewhere at a certain time. However, what is time but a form of measurement, a way for us to record, plan and predict our reality. There is no time in nature, just the present moment that changes in accordance with a set of laws. Yet we put so much emphasise on the importance of ‘time’, a human concept, which we use to control our lives. Time is needed in this world and it does help us coordinate and get things done, but so often it becomes a distraction...

24 October, 2018 /

When driving there are things we can’t control, such as what other people do on the road, the amount of traffic or what the weather is like. The only thing we can control is how we respond to these outside influences. Everything else can be taken away from us, but the freedom to choose our response in any given situation is ours and ours alone. However, quite often we don’t realise this, or if we do we forget, and instead of consciously choosing our reaction we leave it up to our subconscious. After all it is quicker and requires less...

03 October, 2018 /

The other day I was overtaken while waiting to turn right at a roundabout. There was no lane to do this and I had only been there a few seconds. Had a police car been there they would have been pulled over. As I saw him coming down the side, pulling up next to me with his dog on his lap, my initial thoughts were negative and condemning, but after the event I reflected on it and remembered that we all want the same thing. We do what we do because we feel it will make us happy or we will...

01 May, 2018 /

It’s incredible how interconnected and interdependent we all are. Most of us living in the modern world rely on a massive number of people without even realising it. Take our drive to work as an example: Firstly, our cars require a staggering number of people we’ve never met to design, build, transport and sell so it arrives on our drive. Then consider the processes of producing the raw materials needed for the car, or the history of the company that built it and how they only exist because of the efforts of others over the decades. Then there’s the fuel and...

24 March, 2018 /

There is no fear of the present moment. Fear is a fixation on what we imagine will be a negative future or the recurrence of what we remember as a negative past. These are both mental phantoms and have no physical reality. We create and engaged with them to help us prepare for or avoid possibilities that ultimately may never happen. But instead of helping us, they can cripple us. We become less capable as our attention is distracted by these phantoms. Ironically if we didn’t have these fears we would cope with the situation just fine, thinking clearly and...

24 February, 2018 /