Drive


Dear Eugene,

"What drives you?"

I was asked this question this past weekend, a question, I suppose, we've all been asked, in different settings, by different people, under different shades of moonlight.

It's about time I give an answer.  I'd usually question the questioner's question, at least three questions thrown back his/her way; but none of that evasion today.

I came up with something worse.

My answer is: This question (not the questioner) disgusts me, that whenever I hear it I feel this strong repulsion in me to expose its wrongheadedness, by doing exactly the opposite of what it suggests I should be doing to wake up meaningful the next morning, specifically by resisting what proposes to make claim on my will and hope and energy and the very next step I take, and I would slam on the brake to grind my every action to a halt and see if my non-drivenness would kill me.  And if it does, then I shall meet the Person who drives me in my dying.

There you go, spit out.  And it's no mere talk.

Monday I was house-sitting for my in-laws.  They're having their roof replaced but somehow there was no one home to liaise between the roofers and the commander-in-chief, my brother-in-law, who was at work.  I had a day off so I volunteered.  I brought a book, a good book, one that I really wanted to read and now I had a chance.  I read it for about 30 minutes and decided to shut the pages and just sit there in the big empty echoing high-ceiling dining hall and just do absolutely nothing and see if it's going to kill me.

Here I am, I could go up and join the roofers and match their work pound for pound (not that they would let me), toil myself a meaningful existence, but I am sitting here doing absolutely nothing, paying attention to the sound of silence, the shifting shadow of a particle in the air, a wave otherwise unseen by my nothing eyes if not for a few faint rays of light peeking through the blinds.  Now, here's minute, given to nothing.  Then an hour, devoted to nothing.  Eventually a day, punctuated by a period, an exclamation, a final question mark of NOTHINGNESS to close it off conclusively.

That's when I was ready to listen, not to the question, but to the Questioner, the Person who emerged from the valley of the shadow of death, and I was ready for his voice, "Who drives you?"

Yours, Alex

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