Life & Therapy

It took me a long time to learn how to drive a car with manual transmission.   With automatics, you just put the car in “drive” and off it goes, but manual brings many wonderful nuances to driving.  I learned that the car needs to reach a certain speed before I could shift up to the next gear for that shift to go smoothly.   It took me a while to wrap my head around that- I would shift too soon, as if being in a higher gear would make the car go faster.  Then I’d either stall out, or very slowly force the car to catch up to the gear, using a ton of gas, and not moving any faster for quite a while.

There are times in which we “up-shift” too soon in our lives, hoping that things will go faster, even though we aren’t up to the right speed in that department.  It could be that we hope a relationship will suddenly get deeper if we force the next step.  Maybe we take on tasks that are too complicated for our level of understanding, hoping that we will advance more quickly in our career.   If we aren’t up to speed yet, taking these steps might cause us to stall out, or at least make things much harder and more stressful than if we’d taken our time with things.

In driving, you know instantly if you have up-shifted too quickly- the car groans or coughs, and you usually have an opportunity to down-shift or pop into neutral before it stalls out.  Our emotional and physical self will also groan or cough if we push it forward too quickly.  We can learn to understand our internal engine so that we can down-shift when it is necessary.  When it is time to take the next step, it will go much more smoothly if we are up to speed and not forcing ourselves forward.