I have always felt that Driver's Education and Driver's Training were the two relevant pieces of high school education. I've never forgotten the experience, and probably use the lessons each time I drive. In my day, we began driver's training with a simulator. It seemed quite advanced, though would seem quite primitive today. There was a film we watched, and then we were recorded as to how quickly we braked when a ball rolled into the road, things like that.
This is being eliminated in schools, has been, but it sounds very official now, and if teenagers wait until they are eighteen to drive, it is not required at all. What false economy. I think of the accidents that will occur because young people are not trained to drive, are not aware it is a skill, a privilege, and not a right.
I find it very sad.
Today is tax day, another reason to pull down, and yet, I did my five minutes of noticing my breathing this morning, and it was like a sweet spot in the center of my chest that spreads out through my arms and heart. Quite fun. Try it. Take five minutes to notice your breath, preferably in the morning as you wake, before it is interfered with, with obligations and a to-do list.
To counter all the above, I offer this:
"Anyone who stays long enough in a landscape .... will eventually absorb some of what is wild about the place and come to realize that they are as much a part of it as the flora and fauna around them, and that their own innate wildness is affecting the place as much as the place affects them."
Mark Dowie, The Fiction of Wilderness