“You can’t steer a stationary ship.”
Nicolas Cole, Twitter
I remember as a kid, sitting in the driver’s seat of my parent’s car and pretending to drive. My little hands would hang on the steering wheel as I would speed down the streets and drift through turns with Fast & Furious precision. Contrast that with what was actually happening and you would’ve laughed as you saw little me making exhaust noises with my mouth and yanking on the immovable steering wheel.
Put that car in motion, however, and the steering wheel loosens right up. You could drive with your pinky fingers if you wanted to—although I would strongly advise against that. It’s motion that gives us the power to direct. Idleness is what takes that power away. And even with all of our might, child or adult, we can’t steer a parked car. Which is exactly what so many of us are trying to do with the cars of our lives: we’re living our dreams in our heads.
We plan and plot and envision and goal set and try to come up with the perfect course that will take us precisely from where we are to where we want to be. And we’re also sitting in our cars, hanging from the steering wheel, making exhaust noises with our mouths, and whipping through turns with Fast and Furious precision. We’re trying to drive a parked car. And you wonder why people giggle sometimes when they hear you?
Course correction can only happen when you’re on a course. You can’t adjust the direction of a single dot plotted on a map. You need a second dot, a plot of where the dot has moved to, in order to understand and adjust the trajectory. And so it is with all of your goals and aspirations in life. You get there by driving your car—steering your ship—in the direction of your dreams and making adjustments as you go. As you experience the world and as you get feedback from your actions.
The journey never works out to be the straight line that we envision in our heads anyways. There are always unaccounted for (and many times spontaneous) twists and turns and bumps and driving hazards that come up. Thankfully, straight isn’t the only direction forward and there’s a steering wheel that comes with the car of your life that you can use to navigate those obstacles. So long as you keep your car in drive, that is.