Driving In Silence

For readers who don't have a train

It’s summer, so for the next few weeks it’s time for a little change in format: Phone Free Will Summer Shorts. Answers to reader questions and yet more humiliating admissions. Then back to normal in September.

A few people have written lovely emails sharing their experiences fighting the phone - and questions about driving in silence have come up again and again.

I believe deeply in carving out time to do nothing in a way that fits into the day. Adding something additional always ends up costing others: “Hey love - can you get the kids up and out of the house? I’m going to do nothing for a bit cos I read this guy on Substack”.

So for me the journey to work is perfect. But I’m aware that, although sometimes it feels like the entire world is crammed onto the 8.48 from Surbiton to Waterloo, not everyone commutes by train.

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I started driving in silence a few weeks after I first began meditation. And because the stupid kids need stupid lifts all the stupid time to stupid places just round the corner, it’s collectively added up to quite a lot of time. It’s hard to separate out from the sitting practice I had developed at home, but I think over time driving in silence has really helped me.

It was while driving that I realised that mindfulness was giving me more control over my instinctive negative reactions - particularly involving a sharp reduction in under-the-dashboard middle fingers at old ladies who cut me up.

And it was during driving that my brain fully clocked that all thoughts arose without authorship; and that even the thoughts that seemed to be observing that were themselves just unauthored thoughts.

Plus I like driving, it’s fun.

We all need mental rest in our day. And while it might seem odd to look for mental rest when you should clearly be concentrating, I’d argue that mental rest is not at all like physical rest - you can likely get it gardening, swimming or walking. My tentative rule of thumb - if an activity has a capacity for desperate and painful boredom, then it can work. Read more about that here, and why - weirdly - mental rest might be best attempted when you’re alert.

Of course the irony of using driving time is that rather than eradicating phone use (as on my train commute) it reduces time spent listening to the radio, audiobooks and music. These pre-date the phone of course. But given that you now likely experience heavy stimulation at all other times, cutting out the radio is - in my view - a small price to pay to counterbalance that. I’ve argued that even the most benign audio cuts out the silence we need - and that it’s perfectly possible to avoid rest by listening to a podcast arguing that rest would be a great thing.

To gradually get from boring to bearable, my guess would be start small, maybe a few minutes at a time at first. I found it helpful to use the standard focus-noticing meditation technique, transplanted to driving. So I focus on the road, and when I catch the mind wandering off it, I just notice that and come back to the road. Do that enough and it should gradually feel easier, not because you’ve toughened up, but because the noticing itself changes the way your mind works.

If I’m right, you should start to feel 24/7 benefits in mood and phone use control within a few weeks.

If I’m wrong… well at least you were concentrating on the road all that time.

Good luck, and if you’re giving it a try, let me know.

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Thanks so much for reading! If you know anyone who’s tired of their phone use (or if there’s anyone whose phone use you are tired of) please share this with them.

This is part of a series of articles following 1,000 hours of silence on the London commute. The very strange story of how that started is here.

All my posts, both new and archive, are free and are neatly categorised at phonefreewill.com.

Photo by Brecht Denil on Unsplash