Fit for a Spin

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When you get new things that you depend on it seems wise to me to test ‘em out.  Get used to how it works, get to know the quirks.  This is like the test drive in a car.  But modern test drives really are nothing of the sort.  Commonly this is known as taking the car for a spin.  What I have now discovered is that the first “real” drive is the post-purchase.  This is the real “shakedown” spin cycle - to mix my metaphors.

Well I was fit for a spin with a new car to slide into.  The first spin was a 40 mile loop around Fredericksburg.  I attached the iPod to the USB and selected the first song that played the day I purchased it “Flight of the Wild Goose” by the group Iona. 

This was the “Wild Goose” getting a chance to spread its wings a bit.  We took it easy, just enjoying the late afternoon sunshine and back country roads, down into old town Fredericksburg, getting a bit of freeway time and back onto the country lanes.

It was a lovely “get to know you” drive, leaving me with a strong desire for a proper day long road trip.  

This brings to mind many other things too.  For one, getting to know another person, dating or not.  You see someone, hear about them, have an occasion to meet them.  You get a good first impression and you are left wanting to know them better.  And so it goes.

Honda cars have a good reputation for giving years of faithful service.  Not everyone’s experiences are the same, of course.  The idea is if you take care of the car, it will serve you a very long time.  You can see the allegory to human relationships.

Let’s transition to the spiritual life.  I admit to a Universalist approach of sorts: I believe every person looks for meaning in life.  Making sense of life and the meaning of life is a spiritual pursuit.  Perhaps this can be analogous to the type of transport: Planes, Trains, Automobiles, Bicycle, Feet, Motorcycle, and so on.  We have preferences of expressed “faith”, that in which we place our trust.  We may have tested another mode but been burned or disappointed or simply not “wowed” to woo us away from our main preference.

We all have a world view, an understanding and belief of how the world works. Everyone we meet has a different world view - even though some so similar as to be declared the same - they are not.  These differences can be expressed by all that lines we used to delineate our differences: religion, politics, gender, race, sexual identity, language, tribe, nationality, and all the subtleties of these and more.

The bottom line of transport, from my perspective, is to get us to where we want to go. To take us from point A to point B.

The bottom line of world views / faith / trust systems, from my perspective, is to care for the widows, orphans, marginalized, vulnerable, with compassion, and without condition.  As I think about it today, we are all, to varying degrees, fragile and vulnerable.  So how nice it would be to treat one another - at the very least - as a car with which we look forward to many years of faithful service - but how much better to take care of one another because its simply the right thing to do.