By: Hannah Ahn

   There’s no moment when childhood seems to leave your body as suddenly as it does when you’re first staring down at the steering wheel. It’s a warm Sunday afternoon, and you’re seventeen years old. You’ve just gotten your driving permit two weeks ago, and your father has finally made time in his busy schedule to teach you how to drive. As you begin to back out of the driveway, you can’t help but notice the shifty looks your father gives to the locked car door. As if he’s contemplating whether jumping out of a moving car at twenty miles per hour might be safer than staying inside of it with you. 

   I am a late driver, a late bloomer. For various reasons, while my friends have long ago mastered the art of parallel parking and engaging in vehicular duels for parking spaces downtown, at the age of seventeen, I am just now learning which pedal accelerates, and which pedal breaks. 

   Driving is a bit like high school: there’s plenty of cliques. Immediately, I feel as though I’ve been inducted as a new member of a dozen secret little clubs. Whenever I spot a fellow “Student Driver” sticker plastered on a car, I feel the warmth of camaraderie, of kinship. We are a rare class of people, us student drivers. Almost universally disliked by other civilians, for reasons completely out of our control. Other cars on the road shun us. The “Student Driver” sticker seems to blast nakedly out into the world: The person inside of this dangerous metal box doesn’t know what the hell they’re doing. 

   Driving, to me, has always felt like the final passageway between childhood and adulthood. Somewhere, in-between the tunnel of me learning how to turn on the ignition and the first time I drove on the highway, I’d become seventeen years old. I felt conflicted at this new revelation. The freedom of driving is that you can now go anywhere in the world. The terror of driving is that you can now go anywhere in the world. 

   But just like all activities, the monotony of driving quickly catches up to you. As a child, whenever we visited arcades, my brother and I fought over who would get first turn on Driving Simulator. My parents used to tease us, for, in their eyes, the equivalent of fighting over who was going to load the dishwasher. “We’ve got the real thing at home sitting in the garage,” they would say. “But it stops being fun, real fast.” Maybe my initial excitement over being able to drive, I wonder, is just evidence of my lingering immaturity. By the time we are old enough to do anything for ourselves that we idolized as children: grocery-shopping, cooking, driving, shopping- it has already registered as a chore. Driving becomes another thing to get done on the never-ending to-do list that seems to pervade adult lives.

   My father tells me that despite what society says, being a poor driver is not, in fact, a moral failing. No one, he reminds me, is born knowing how to drive. The act of driving is something miraculous, then, a defiance of nature. It is the one activity where learning is acceptable, and going slow, then, is almost always an act of wisdom.

   As a child, I loved being the fastest. I remember feeling pride when I was the quickest to pick up a game, when I turned in a worksheet before anyone else in class. “Speed is not indicative of quality,” my first-grade teacher, Ms. Matthews, was fond of telling me. And yet it’s true. As the years have passed, I find my life speeding up.

   I am afraid, then, of what I am hurtling towards. Just like any driver who gets into a car, my life is headed towards a destination. College is the next traffic light in front of me, but no one can say for certain how the road unfurls itself. In the same way that no one enters life knowing how to drive, there is a beauty in the act of learning, of experiencing. It’s why, on the days I drive anywhere, I allow myself to be overtaken with childish, gleeful, illogical delight. I am headed where I am headed. The multiple people to whom Google attributes the quote “Enjoy the ride!”, may in fact be onto something.

   There are certain moments in life that have a symmetrical quality to them, that are endowed with the beauty of metaphor. It’s not often when Life itself makes you laugh, or think, or pause. But one of these moments occurred to me after my first driving lesson. As soon as I parked, a notification buzzed. I glanced down at my phone. It was a report for a minor collision on the highway caused by a speeding vehicle. I stared down for a long time at the notification. It was only another reminder, I thought to myself, to slow down.