Sitting in Neutral

​Imagine that your mind is your car. You drive it wherever you want to go, maneuvering it as you desire, turning here and there, accelerating to get there faster, wherever there is, braking when something gets in your way, honking the horn if the driver of another car does something to irritate you. 
 
Now imagine that you decide to come to a stop, sit in the driver's seat, but not control the car. You shift the transmission into neutral. You take your hands off the steering wheel and place them in your lap. You lift your feet from the accelerator and brake and place them flat on the floor. 
 
You are no longer in control of this vehicle that you are accustomed to taking you wherever you want to go. But now where is it going to go? The transmission is in a neutral position, not in "Park," and you aren't pressing the brake pedal. So gravity is going to take over, which means it depends where your car is on the road, on the landscape.
 
Imagine that the road is your path in life and that the landscape is the world you are traversing. When we sit down and begin a period of Centering Prayer, our initial experience depends on where we are on the road, our place on the landscape. If you were coasting down a hill, you'll keep going, but what will happen if the car veers off the road? If you were on a long cross-country trip and you pulled off into a rest area and put the car in neutral, how are you going to finish the trip? If you were part way up a  mountain when you put it in neutral, maybe the car will slowly start going in the reverse direction. No matter the scenario, it seems we usually find ourselves worrying about the potential outcome from giving up control.
 
So depending where we are on the highway of life, each of us will experience our Centering Prayer time differently from one another, and each time we sit, we will have a different experience than the time before or after. But the longer we sit, the more time we give for the car to come to rest, to find a low spot in the road where gravity can no longer move the car. It is at rest and will remain at rest until we re-engage the transmission and put our foot on the accelerator. 
 
Initially, we may think this is wrong. Our car was made to be driven. It can go at amazing speeds and take us wherever we want to go, but not if it is just sitting there in neutral. We may feel an overriding desire to put it back in gear and take off. But after a few times of trying this practice, we may decide we like giving our car - that is, our mind - a rest. 
 
We begin to realize that there are fewer places we really want to go. We may be content just staying where we are. We may find new joy in just viewing the beauty of the landscape instead of zooming across it in search of a new horizon. We may find peace not having to constantly be attentive to maneuvering along the road, passing those who get in our way. We may find that when someone gets in our way, instead of irritating us, we become more curious about who they are and where they are going. 
 
We begin seeing the landscape in new ways and realize that there are many other roads and paths we can take. We don't even have to drive the car. We can get out and walk and discover that there is more to see in walking a few yards than we observed in many miles of racing our car along the highway, always in the passing lane. The meaning of life seems to find new fullness in reverse proportion to the pace at which we live our life. 
 
As counterintuitive as it might feel in our got-to-get-to-where-I-am-going world, pull your car off the road as often as you can - whether into a scenic overlook or a Walmart parking lot - and put it into neutral and take your hands off the wheel and your feet off the pedals and see what happens.