What I've Learned About Myself: Road Trips

I’ve spent a lot of time on the road since over the past year. And when I say “a lot” let me give you some statistics. I’ve put about 24,000 miles on my car since we bought it in April 2017. The average mileage per year is about 12,000, and my car spent about two months in a repair shop. These trips have been all over the place but the mostly consist of trips between seeing my family, friends from school, and my grandpa when I was spending a lot of time taking care of him (more to come on that in tomorrow’s post).

One thing I have noticed about all this time in the car is that I have spent a lot of time thinking about metaphors for life from the perspective of driving, highways, and the basic mechanics of a car. These metaphors have given me a lot of clarity and have helped me immensely with prioritizing, managing expectations, and they have proven to be fantastic conversation starters as well!

These near constant travels have also taught me just how broad is my range of musical interests. Scrolling through my “Driving” playlist you can find anything from a song from a Broadway show, to rap and hip-hop, to Maroon 5 and even the occasional Billy Joel. Driving alone allows for great personal time to think, but it also allows me to explore different kinds of music. Every now and then I turn off my Bluetooth and listen to the radio to see what songs are playing and find new ones that I like (I call these moments “song interviews” haha!). My family already has very broad interests when it comes to music, so I learned growing up to give new genres a couple tries before dismissing them.

Thank you for reading! If you’d like me to do a series to go deeper into my driving metaphors and explain them in more detail, leave a comment here or on the link on my Facebook page and I’ll start that right after finishing this series!