The Cruising Mind

There’s two things I do when I need to replenish my mind: make a cup of coffee and go for a cruise.

A cruise is a meandering drive, preferably somewhere scenic, that has no established end.  Unlike driving, which has a planned route and ultimate destination—the grocery store, the gas station—cruising is purposeless.  You don’t cruise to arrive somewhere, you cruise to roam, to wander.    

My tradition of cruising began with my mother.  After she turned forty, she suffered a mid-life crisis and bought an outrageously impractical silver Saab convertible.  She loved nothing more than taking her new car out for a cruise.  When I was a teenager, our rides were leisurely excursions, rare opportunities in our fast-paced lives to simply chat or listen to The Pretenders.  I looked forward to these unhurried moments with my mother.  Balmy wind blowing through my hair, disconnected stills of mountains and lakes merging to form a comprehensible motion picture outside my window, the world seemed more capable of being understood. 

There are many reasons to go on a cruise—to reconnect with a loved one, to find respite, however brief, from boredom, to luxuriate in the bliss of doing something for its own sake without regard for outcomes—but today I usually cruise when I’m perplexed by my work. 

How do I write a compelling hook?  

Is the sky I’m describing “cobalt” or “sapphire”?  “azure” or “baby blue”? 

When I’m sitting with a mug of black coffee in hand, lost in a labyrinth of convoluted syntax or maze of endless synonyms, I know it’s time to leave my desk and go for a cruise.  As Dorothea Brande advised in her seminal Becoming a Writer, writers need a “wordless, repetitive activity” to distract their logical conscious mind and tap into their more creative subconscious reservoirs. 

For some writers, walking has served that purpose.  William Wordsworth was perhaps literature’s most famous walker.  Father of the Romantic movement who exalted the glory of nature, he walked as many as 150,000 miles over the course of his eighty years.  “The act of walking is indivisible from the act of making poetry: one begets the other,” he affirmed.  A stroll through the park, a saunter through a city street: the simple movement of putting one foot after another allowed his ideas to move too.  

Others prefer the brisk pace of a jog to the ambling tempo of a walk.  Novelist Haruki Murakami, for instance, rises everyday at four, writes, and then runs several miles before returning to his desk.  As he runs away from the everyday familiarity of home, he runs into the uncharted, the unknown.  In strange lands, his thoughts take on strange new forms (even when his “strange” land is just around the block).  Suddenly he can abandon the linear route of rationality and follow the more winding path of instinct and free associative thought. 

While some writers walk and run, still others bake (Emily Dickinson), others play music (Madeleine L’Engle) and still others paint and draw (Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton).

My wordless, repetitive activity has always been going for a cruise.  Its habitual, almost automatic tasks— releasing the emergency brake, shifting into drive, alternating between the gas and brake pedals—keep my logical conscious mind occupied enough so my more imaginative subconscious can do its work.  “I find God in the car,” I remember a woman at one of my mom’s A.A. meetings sharing, the squeak of people shifting in plastic chairs and the smell of cheap coffee filling the church assembly room.  I don’t know if I’d call what I encounter in my car “God,” but I do feel I have access to a more expansive intelligence with the windows down, my foot on the gas pedal.

In many ways, the concept of “cruising” is a relic of another era.  More than a half century ago, the car was seen not just as a means to an end but a pleasure unto itself.  Usually undertaken in the afternoon, a cruise—or, as it was more commonly called, a “Sunday drive”—was a time for families to hop in their 1956 Chevrolets and drive without the work-week agenda.  Sadly, the tradition of the Sunday drive has all but disappeared from American culture.  Today the old pastime lives on mostly in the pejorative “Sunday driver”—a derogatory term denoting a person who’s maddeningly slow behind the wheel.

So why has cruising all but disappeared?

One can blame the American work ethic, a legacy inherited from our rigorously disciplined Puritan grandparents.  Much like our forefathers, who believed hard work and strict self-denial brought glory to God, Americans worship at the altar of productivity and despise nothing more than idleness.  Results-oriented and achievement-obsessed, we prefer the gratification of checking another item off our to-do list to doing something “unproductive.”  Leisure and laziness are so inextricable in our society that most people are ridden with guilt when they so much as take a moment for themselves.  “You are what you accomplish and how well you accomplish it” our culture seems to tell us.  

But though our capitalist society stigmatizes leisure as decadent and self-indulgent, idleness is a crucial component of the creative process.  Though today leisure has come to signify an aimless frittering away of time in trivial pursuits, to the ancient Greeks, leisure, or scholé (interestingly the linguistic progenitor of the English word for school), was a time for learning and introspection indispensable both to the advancement of civilization and the expansion of the human soul.  Whereas we in the modern era preach the gospel of work, the ancients viewed labor as a debasement of their higher selves.  Work was seen as a necessary evil, required for survival but a hindrance to nobler pursuits.  It was only when man was free of the shackles of burdensome toil, they believed, that he could devise, dream, and discover truth.

Indeed, throughout time, leisure has been the fountainhead of all progress.  Many of the most noteworthy human achievements—the greatest art, the most pioneering ideas of philosophy, the spark of every epoch-making scientific breakthrough—were conceived in leisure, in moments unburdened by duty or, as Bertrand Russell once said, in periods of “fruitful monotony,” be it Alexander Graham Bell solving the puzzle of the harmonic telegraph while strolling through a bluff overlooking the Grand River or Mozart noting that it was during promenades in the park that his ideas flowed most “abundantly.”  A cruise may seem like an indefensible indulgence, but such quiet moments offer fertile soil for breakthroughs.

When I drive south along the winding path of my street, past blushing pink cherry trees and rolling hills of prune orchards, my customary way of thinking shrinks with each mile, appearing smaller and smaller until it fades entirely from view.  As I cruise into the larger landscape, I cruise into a larger state of mind, a larger sense of self.  Overhead, the sky is almost completely engulfed in clouds, a mass of milk white interrupted by the occasional bit of blue.  The air is awake with the crisp freshness of morning mingled with the rejuvenating scent of lavender: I, like the world, am beginning anew.  Suddenly the solution to the problem I was puzzling over seems so simple.  Of course I should start my essay with a bit of narration!  Of course the sky is “azure” and not “baby blue”!  At twenty five miles per hour, the mind can meet the muse.