Saturday’s driving practice was mostly good, with just one rather scary moment: I turned into a street, heading uphill, but had to pull behind a parked car because the little streets in Wick were made for horses and everyone parks on either side of the road, which makes the whole experience feel an awful lot like this:
My beloved tried to say helpful things, but his tension prompted me to freak out and stall, and even though I managed to get out of the situation, I wound up feeling shaken, scared, and like I really wanted to quit driving.
Nevertheless, I had a lesson scheduled for late this afternoon and was ready for it. I thought it might be cancelled, because we scheduled it for a different time and the sky was growing dark (surely night-time driving would be a whole other set of lessons). But no, we went ahead as planned.
Somehow, under my instructor’s patient direction, I was shifting up and down and turning corners, and everything started going smoothly again. It was even kind of fun””though my heart was still racing. Evidently I seemed fine to my instructor, because we stopped and reviewed roundabouts for a bit, then he had me drive through every one of them in town””from several directions! (Okay, there are two of them, and they’re “mini-roundabouts”, but the people of this town use them like particle accelerators.)
It’s just this clutch business: it’s so very Chitty-Chitty Bang-Bang to be that involved with the workings of a machine in 2013. If I can get this, though, I can get anything. I’m just not used to doing frightening things that I’m no good at. I can’t wait until shifting becomes so natural that I can move up the Maslovian pyramid of responsibilities and start paying proper attention to all the other things my instructor keeps stressing, like people and stuff.