More than painted lines

Driving is one of the scariest things that you’re told you can’t mess up. You are literally driving a 4,000 pound machine; imagine that like driving a smaller adult elephant, or a pallet of bricks. If either of those 4,000 pound things were to hit or somehow end up on top of a person, it would be very hard to save that person's life. Now put it into the perspective of a car; I think that as humans we so easily take driving for granted and don’t understand that the only thing that keeps our cars from hitting each other is painted lines on the ground. Because driving is such a normal everyday thing in most people's lives, we start to forget how dangerous it can be. Even though nothing happens with most drives, it only takes one time to let your guard down for everything to change. 

You can make minor mistakes, and those can usually be fixed if you are paying attention and have learned how to prevent them. But if you keep making mistakes because you’re choosing not to follow the rules that have been put in place for not only your safety but for others, where can that lead you? Maybe it can lead you to a close call, where you're driving on the highway, and you get a text; you think to yourself, it's just my mom asking about dinner. I can respond quickly. Then you're on your phone for the next minute because it wasn’t the text you thought; every 5 seconds you look up. But after a while, traffic suddenly stops, and you slam on the brakes. Your heart is pounding as if you just ran a mile because your nervous system is in shock, but you're happy because you missed the car only a couple inches. Then maybe you start to pay more attention for the next few days, but then after a while you forget what happened, and you keep driving how you normally would. It’s so easy to think to yourself that nothing happened, so it doesn’t matter that much, especially when you're in the car alone. No one is there to tell you that that could have been a lot worse than it was; you could have easily caused a multi-car collision over a text message that could’ve waited 10 more minutes. 

What happens when you start to become overconfident and you start to believe that you're a better driver than everyone else, and you keep making these mistakes, and every time you successfully text and drive or break a different rule, you start to reinforce the bad habit. So you start to not care enough to prevent them because you've gotten through them before without a scratch? What happens when instead of trying to follow the rules you start to do the opposite and commit something that you feared doing before. What happens when things like driving over 90 miles per hour become your normal routine? When swerving through lanes at high speeds, being drunk, high, or intoxicated with other or multiple substances at a time, or being on your phone while driving becomes your normal? Maybe somehow the police never catch you, or maybe they do, but to you it’s ok because in your mind you knew what you were doing because you're a better driver than the rest of us on the road. Or maybe you become a news article, or a news headline, a social media post, a documentary, or maybe just a statistic. 

When you're doing these reckless actions, you don’t think about the family members that are still waiting for their loved one to come home, or the new driver that is driving for the first time by themselves, the emergency responders that have to help with crashes every day, or the guilt of being the person that could’ve caused someone else's life to end. This is the story of so many others, others that aren’t here anymore because of it, or some that have guilt from hurting someone else from preventable actions. Every time you drive, you have a decision. You can either choose to put your phone down, slow down, make it home safely, and help everyone else do the same. Being a good driver isn’t about the top speed you can drive or how quickly you can get in between cars. It’s about appreciating and respecting all the lives that are around you every time you put your car in drive and accelerate.