Slow Turning

I was riding in the car with Eli today and he noticed a man in front of us on a Harley.  Specifically, he noticed that the man on the Harley was leaning into the turn as we made our way around an exit ramp.  He also noticed that he felt himself leaning in a similar way.  He asked me about that lean and I explained that leaning just enough into a turn keeps a person from losing balance and traction.  Eli then asked me something only a five year old would, “daddy, why are there turns?”

How do you answer that?  I went straight for the annoyed (but restrained) parent of a five year old response “because if there weren’t, we couldn’t get anywhere”.  That was meant to end the line of questioning; it did not.  He demanded an explanation.  He’s five.  So I tried to explain that if the road we were currently traveling on were only ever straight, we wouldn’t be able to get to our home via that road because our home was in another direction.

At this point, I was clearly assuming that my kid is looking for some kind of logical, mathematic solution that he can plug in to some sort of experiential matrix that might serve him for a lifetime.  He demonstrated how wrong I was by interrupting with his next statement ”…we just keep turning and turning, back and forth; sometimes we go straight for a little bit, then we turn again, and again,…”

Okay, so I’ve got a little poet sitting in a car seat behind me, or maybe a philosopher.  I can relate.  I then asked him about what he thought of turning.  “It’s alright, sometimes I like it-like when it’s not fast.”

Few people can get me thinking as much about so little.  I could not stop thinking about turning.  It’s not constant.  It is sometimes fun and sometimes a bit scary.  It’s disorienting and yet it can be indicative of progress toward a goal, or not.  Racecar drivers have typically mastered many variations of turning in one direction.  We experience it everyday in many forms; we turn our cars (bikes, motorcycles, boats, etc.), we turn our steps, we turn heads, we turn our eyes, we even turn our hearts at times.

But one thought cut through.  Eli made his observation from a perspective without a steering wheel.  He was and is a rider, not a driver.  His view is one of pure reaction.  It has been a long time since I held that view.  I tried to answer him from an alien vantage point and got lost in it.  His question was far more elegant.  “Why is there change that we must adapt to?”  I am so embedded in my experiential and conceptual adulthood that to ask such a question seems completely out of touch, even foolish.

But who is the fool?  I have accepted not only the premise of turning/change but have invested myself in finding the best methods, tools and timing.  I am a company man when it comes to turns.  I know the thousand answers to his question, but can give none that will satisfy him; “someday, you’ll understand”-that sucks.

I pray that the times ‘when it’s not fast’ vastly outnumber those that are.

Pastor Mike