A Foggy Drive

photo by mvy

It was dark. Snow lined both sides of the road, but the road itself was clear. Late January/early February in northwestern Indiana is always cold, and this night was no exception. Thankfully, the heater in my second-hand Ford Pinto worked well enough to keep my friend and I warm as we drove home from seeing On Golden Pond.

The cold was the least of our concerns. What bothered us was the fog. We were only five miles or so from the shores of Lake Michigan, and the fog was so dense on the drive home we could barely see my headlights. There was no other traffic on the unfamiliar road, so we couldn’t navigate by someone else’s tail-lights.

I remember creeping along at maybe five miles an hour, hazard lights flashing, both front windows open, heater blowing full blast to keep us warm as my friend and I tried desperately to see the road-surface, navigational signs, or even stop lights. Suddenly my friend said: “Mary, I have a double yellow line on my side.” She was seeing the line that’s in the middle of the road, which meant I was in the wrong lane of this two-lane road. No sooner had I moved back into my proper lane than we saw headlights approaching. If she hadn’t seen that double yellow line at that particular moment, we might have become a headline for our college paper: “Two students killed in auto accident.”

I might be sensationalizing it a little. We were barely moving, and the other car wasn’t in a big hurry either. But the fact remains, we narrowly avoided an accident. This was before cell phones, and in rural Indiana, payphones were rare. Stopping and calling someone wasn’t an option. And we didn’t know anyone where we were -- we had gone to a different town to see the movie, because it hadn’t come to ours yet. We really only had one choice: keep driving slowly and cautiously, and hope the fog lifted. I seem to recall it took us almost 2 hours to drive the 25 miles back to our home town.

It’s been over 30 years since that tension-filled night, and it’s still the first thing that comes to mind when I’m driving in fog.

That’s not the only time I think of it, though. About ten years ago, I realized it was also a metaphor for my emotional healing journey.

As a metaphor, it’s almost perfect. At the beginning of my healing journey, I was on an unfamiliar road, completely surrounded by fog, unable to see anything or anyone else around me. I felt like I was totally alone, and the only positive I could find was that I knew I was actually on the road, as opposed to being crashed in a ditch alongside. And I had a destination -- a worthwhile destination. In 1982, we were trying to get home. And the destination for my healing journey? A healthier me.

There’s one big difference I’ve seen between driving in physical fog, and navigating the metaphorical fog of a healing journey. In both cases, the fog will eventually lift, or the road changes direction and we travel away from the fog. BUT the big difference is what happens when we find ourselves in another foggy spot.

When I’m physically driving in fog, I slow down to a safe speed, and pay extra close attention to what’s around me. If it’s really dense, I might pull off the road and give myself a break from the stress of driving in it. I know that eventually the fog will lift, and I’ll have a clear road again. In other words, I adjust myself to the circumstances I find myself in. I recognize it as a weather issue, and that it’s not my fault.

When the metaphorical fog closes in, I blame myself. I must be doing something wrong. I thought I was further along the healing continuum. I thought I was done with foggy days, and not being able to see if I was on the right road, or even on a road at all. WTH?

The thing is, metaphorical fog is really no different from physical fog, in that it’s not our fault. We don’t cause the metaphorical fog any more than we do the physical fog. It’s a naturally occurring facet of our healing journey, and can be navigated the same way we do physical fog.

Recognize the foggy conditions. Slow down if necessary, but continue our forward momentum. Pause if needed, but make sure it’s a pause, not a full stop. The only way to get out of the fog is to keep going through the fog. It can be scary, even disorienting, but the fog WILL lift, and the sun will shine again, as long as we keep moving forward, even at a snail’s pace.