Warning …. This blog is very wordy and may not be something you all like … and very different from the last blog … but here goes ….
Road trips are full of twists and turns… and long, long straights too.
They are meditative in many ways… and when you’re driving old cars, they keep you on your toes. The driving seems to be much more in the moment.
This blog has emerged out of the 10 or so days of driving through parts of Angola, Namibia, and now Botswana (between 25 September and 7 October). It essentially reflects the procrastinations that have arisen from the meditative process of a road trip.
We have covered some significant kilometres over the last 12 days, weaving our way out of Angola and into Namibia and Botswana as we head to Victoria Falls. We also plan to take a day trip from Botswana into Zimbabwe to visit Victoria Falls before heading south in Botswana as we make our way towards Durban.
Our journey took us to the magnificent Calandula Falls and the Black Rocks (Pungo Andonga in Portuguese) before we wove our way south—sometimes on wonderful, new roads, and sometimes on paths that turned into kilometres and kilometres of rough dirt tracks, yet identified as highways.
We drove through some very remote parts of Angola, where we understood that any Angolan can claim land. Thus, the villages extended into bushland that they began to clear—simple subsistence living in a tough environment.
We wild camped on a couple of occasions: one night under some power lines that another overlander had found (where a short tropical downpour turned the place into mud) and another night on the edge of this dirt highway, where a man and child walked by with a plough pulled by two bullocks! A lady similarly came past to say hello as she headed to her garden.
We twisted and turned, driving past large horticultural and agricultural businesses and many little villages filled with nothing but big smiles. Towns had only one fuel bowser and long queues for fuel, where someone often emerged to usher us to the front of the line. I don’t know why, but everyone seemed to smile and try to engage in conversation about what these two old cars were doing in their country, in their town or village.
One night, we found a nice little hotel and were blessed with an all-night dance party blasting out Angolan and Afro Beat. Another night, we stayed in a bigger, flashier hotel (but still cheap) so we had Wi-Fi to watch the AFL Grand Final.
Anyway, enough of the context… on with the procrastination!
This pothole is actually a sink hole…. But you get the picture .
Potholes
Angolan roads are renowned for potholes, and there are plenty of other places we have journeyed through that have bad sections. But what emerged for me was that potholes are kind of a metaphor for life, as is a long and winding road.
They occur on roads due to a combination of factors, including (but not limited to) poor initial construction, weaknesses in small sections of the road allowing the erosional forces of weather and the intense friction and wear and tear of traffic pounding over the weakened surface. They mostly get worse without maintenance and repairs, meaning that whole sections of roads become a traffic nightmare.
Kind of like life.
We all have certain weaknesses, indulgences, and patterns. If we don’t do the maintenance and repairs, things get worse and worse!
And the road itself is a metaphor for life too. It’s mainly about the journey; it stretches out before you and behind. But every moment is the now. If travelling quickly, it’s easy to crash into a pothole; it happens no matter how aware you seek to be.
On this journey… a million potholes! Probably many, many more.
The extent of potholes in any section of road, in whatever country you are in, is also an indication of the management systems and resources dedicated to road repair. In life, it’s a bit the same. We need to dedicate time, resources, and energy into our own maintenance, or more and more potholes are likely to occur.
Dirt roads are kind of similar. In some places they are maintained; in others, they are rarely maintained. In those without maintenance, the ruts in a road (especially dirt/gravel roads) become set in place, making it hard to get out of those ruts. Much the same as in life. If the patterns of our less desirable behaviour become stuck in a rut, it takes a whole lot to shift out of that pattern.
Thinking about this reminded me of the yogic expression (apparently derived from the Upanishads) that I learned somewhere along my yogic journey—I think from reading Rod Stryker’s book The Four Desires… it goes something like this: “We are our deepest driving desires; as are our desires, so is our will; as is our will, so are our deeds; as are our deeds, so is our destiny!”
The question is: what are our deepest driving desires? These are often shadow-like patterns that emerge from the unconscious. They might be things you don’t want to reveal to yourself! What deception or pattern are you holding onto? What maintenance system do you need to establish to untangle a particular pattern or behaviour?
I am not going to answer that here but will leave it as a hanging question.
So… this part of my procrastination: potholes, road trips, and particularly rutted roads might be considered useful metaphors for some aspects of our lives.
Rutted and boggy road
Pirsig
More correctly, Robert Maynard Pirsig (6 September 1928 to 24 April 2017), the author of, in my mind, two very important books:
- Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance – 1974
- Lila: An Inquiry into Morals – 1991.
Both books use a journey as the framework for exploring deeper issues. In Zen, Pirsig explores the notion of Quality (and ethics), and in Lila, he divides the concept of Quality into Static and Dynamic Quality (and morals). Without going overboard into this topic, Pirsig suggested that throughout history, events or certain people exhibit dynamic quality that shifts a system—likening, for example, Beethoven to an example of dynamic quality. His compositions shifted the world of classical music (and some say some of his works, when performed in certain circumstances, create a resonance that shifts people). But over time, dynamic quality settles back into static quality, which helps maintain the system or support a system’s culture, much like great examples of architecture.
Another example of Dynamic Quality, in its own way, was the emergence of the rock band Silverchair—three 15-year-old boys from Newcastle, Australia. They were amazing in their day. I bring this up because Jayden played a heavy rock playlist while we drove the other morning, and Silverchair was among the best of that genre. They had a dynamic quality that shifted the heavy rock scene.
Some potholes even get to grow things
Anyway, that was not really what my procrastination was about. As I thought about the technology and technical systems that support road maintenance (and cars, for that matter), I considered all the administration, technical knowledge, and resources needed to maintain roads (and when the roads are full of potholes, the lack of all those things). I started thinking about a quote I recall from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance… it goes something like this:
“The Buddha resides in the gearbox of my motorcycle, as it does in the circuits of my computer, just as it does in the lotus flower. To think otherwise is to defame the Buddha, which is to defame oneself!”
I have always pondered this quote. What was Pirsig getting at? My sense is that it was about trying to pay reverence to human endeavour, or at least some aspects of it—the skill, craft, and insight needed to design and build the artefacts of technology, the gears and circuits.
My critique of this wonderful quote is that Pirsig seemed to focus only on the artefact and not the wider and often pervasive thing that technology has become. Since the 70s, when Pirsig wrote this, technology and capitalism have gone (seemingly) mad. In this postmodern world, we are totally immersed in technological systems and processes, having built great and not-so-great institutions (and companies) to drive and deliver particular technological and commercial outcomes—some good, many not so good, like the current state of the environment and climate.
Driving 60-year-old vehicles—the kind of vehicle technology that was prevalent when Pirsig wrote this—allows me to contemplate our world now, as flashy big 4x4s and trucks of all shapes and sizes rush by, and as many locals utilise (and overload) their much newer cars to make a living, shifting people and things around their amazing countries.
Spending a lot of time dodging potholes, crazy roads, and often crazy drivers gives you a particular view of the world today, especially when you entertain yourself with a mixture of eclectic music genres and also listen to Greg Campbell’s amazing book, Total Reset—a critique of the current state of the world informed by insights gained through spiritual endeavours and learning from a traditional Aboriginal Elder, Lulu (and members of his family). The primary argument is something that certainly resonates with me (though I don’t necessarily agree with all his sentiments): the notion that a unity consciousness is much more likely to help save the world than the crazy duality consciousness paradigm we are presently locked into (to reference Greg Campbell).
Closing Procrastinations
These ideas are far to big to explore in this blog, but what I will conclude with is …. At the individual level we get stuck in ruts and the metaphor of potholes ( there maintenance and or lack of maintenance seems like useful way of thinking about how we need to have maintenance practices and processes to challenge our entrenched patterns … to get us out of the rut .
And while any individual artefacts … Like a 60 year old Peugeot might have the Buddha residing within it …. I don’t believe the Buddha or Prisig would suggest that the Buddha is very present within the wider socio technical systems of contemporary capitalism….and let’s hope that that conversation that are going on about post capitalism learn something from the many insights that are emerging from the wisdom from First Nations people. Hopefully some syncretic blending of insights can exhibit the Dynamic Quality needed to shift the global systems onto a new setting … or as the book title suggests….a Total Reset !
And when you hit the road you might find something big !