No Room For Error

Ocean’s Eleven, Danny Ocean, mastermind thief turns to Linus his partner in crime during the vault heist and says:

Linus: You know, you lose focus in this game for one second…
Danny: I know, somebody gets hurt.

This is a fact the permeates all our doings in every part of our life. I know this because I have lived; I was reminded of this because my mother lived through a car accident. She turned her head away from the road for a fraction of a second and the resulting crash left her banged and bruised and all of us wiser for the wear.

I reminds me of my first driving lesson.

Like every almost sixteen year old, I was eager to learn to drive; and like most parents, my dad was less than eager to teach me. However the day finally came one lovely Saturday afternoon, after much haranguing, my dad agreed to take me out on a drive. As you can imagine I practically flew out of the house with the keys in one hand and a song in my heart. I jumped in his then almost brand new 1987 Nissan Maxima and started the engine, put down all the windows and turned on the radio…loud. My dad came out of the house minutes later the find me dancing to “Holiday” in the driver’s seat. He opened the door, got in the passenger seat turned to me and in his best dad voice said, “Shut the radio, and shut the engine. Immediately.”

“Oh, great” I thought to myself, “this is going to be no fun at all.”

When silence returned to the car, my father turned to me and he said, “Listen to me very closely. This is an automobile. It is not a toy. And driving is not a game. This is an automobile and it weighs thousands of pounds. And the smallest error in judgment on your part, one second of fiddling with the radio and you can change your life and someone else’s forever. Every time you get into the car think long and hard about where your attention is, and where it needs to be.”

I grew up a lot that day, and have never gotten into the car since without flashing to that moment. It’s probably saved my life, and maybe some others, in many ways. Today I look around as I drive and I see distracted, overwhelmed people. People in a rush, drinking their coffee, patting their lap dogs and generally unaware of the thousands pounds of machine they are carelessly in control of.

Don’t be that person. Stop what you’re doing and just drive. Use your signals, stop rushing, move carefully fom here to there. Remember the life you save may be your own, or mine, or my mother’s.