The Road Sphere

There are many spheres in which we live: families, friend circles, places of work or study… We try hard to stay present in all of these spheres while displaying individuality and keeping track of our many obligations in our highly social lifestyles. There is hardly a moment where we cannot socialize while we shop, eat while we play, be entertained while we study, or find several things to do in tandem while we are hard at work. In fact, a person who can balance a glittering social life full of activities while multi-tasking to accommodate their choices can seem properly managed. However, there are spheres of life in which sharing becomes dereliction. Let me introduce you to the road sphere.

The road is a place where humans control machines that are much stronger than humans – where a persons’ actions can be amplified horribly due to engines and metal. Do humans naturally take to operating vehicles with no training or learning? No. Such an advanced skill would require at least the full dedication of the driver to submit themselves to the fact that they are entering into a different sphere – a reality where they need to be taught how to do something carefully and dutifully – and to do nothing but that. If a nation is to be full of drivers, drivers ed must be provided so that humans can attain the safe ability to remain in commute with one another. If many deaths are caused by bad driving, and miseducation of drivers leads to bad driving, it can be argued that proper training and education of driving would lead to less deaths on the road. This is exactly my point. We have chosen to enter a sphere of transit where mobility requires that we improve ourselves through education and training. We cannot simply strive for convenience without working towards safe convenience. Drivers ed needs to be widespread, available, and focused primarily on the safety of driving.

Some steps to help us reduce the number of driving deaths would include realizing that driving is not a task that can be shared with other tasks. Pausing our attention to the road to stay socially connected or to be entertained will lead to disaster. With driving, sharing priorities becomes negligence. Phone use, especially for social and entertainment purposes such as texting, video chatting and watching videos, is an example of the worst mix of driving with other activities. By raising awareness on how miserably people will fail when driving this way, we can hope to see drastic reduction in deaths and accidents due to distracted driving and lethal multi-tasking.

When I was in a car accident as a child as a result of a careless driver ahead of us, I decided that when I grew older, I would put safety first. Put simply, to drive better we all need to give up every effort to do two things at once. We have entered the road sphere.