Your concentration breaks at the bumpy edge of the pavement. You swerve harmlessly back into the middle of your lane without even a first, let alone a second thought. No harm done. What you never notice might never have happened if it is not there in your mind to remember, let alone question. But what if it did make you aware of your own actions? Continuing down the road as you have always done could come with the realization that you are still just following your gaze in order to stay in your lane. But what fills that moment- to - moment gap between where you intend to be and getting there? What is really directing your gaze? Cruise control? Some unconscious thought process as autonomic as breathing itself? You don't necessarily need to know where you'll end up to have the will to put a foot back down on the gas pedal. But you do need at least the illusion of somehow knowing, don't you? There's a word for this 'just what's up ahead' and it may always have been in your driver's seat all along.
Expectation requires nothing but itself to become self-fulfilling most of the time. It does this so easily it's often confused with fate - although confusing the two nearly always gets one into trouble. There are a lot of distractions going on along our world's roadways these days... Financial pile ups. Menacing immoral monsters at home and abroad empowered by lust, or fear, or greed. The spectacles of so many other travelers sidelined by the loss of a job, pulled over by a health crisis, or just having run on empty into a ditch of despair. Living as much of our lives on cruise control as we do, relying so heavily on the dictates of past experience to guide our way, it would be all too easy for one's gaze to follow just a little too long and to go off the road ourselves.
We learn from the expectation of our parents, as much as from what is denied and what is nurtured, who we are and how we ourselves will form our own fortunes. Without even realizing it, you yourself will decide long before life makes those assumptions real or proves them mistaken, how you will feel about the actual experience. And in that lies the secret to many a motorist's achievement of mobile bliss or road rage.
It has long been known that dreams are made up almost entirely of surmise born out of previous experience and cogent suggestion. Follow this gaze and you realize that what you think shapes the experience of the dream itself. You gain conscious control of where you are going moment by moment and thought by thought, managing your expectations and so altering the dream itself as you experience it. Even old recurring nightmares can be transformed into pretty scenery with merely an intention. This 'lucid dreaming' has been well studied, and has been put into practice by many seeking to escape nightly monsters, confront waking fears in private safety, or just to explore and enjoy their own imaginations at will.
In a dream this knowledge gives one control over each coming moment that one can continue on with the habit of remaining lucid. The car may leave the road entirely, sprout wings or disintegrate away, leaving you floating in mid-air amid a landscape of clouds. In waking life, you can become aware of what can change and what cannot. Preconceptions fall away and reality becomes your guide rather than your adversary. Expectation ceases to be the harbinger of fate, and instead becomes but the touch of the steering wheel in your hands. Your gaze perceives the beckoning road as it is, ready for the delight of surprise and alert to danger, but not entranced by anticipation. Try it. Just step on the gas.
