In San Francisco, on the West coast of America in the state of California, there is a group of individuals called taxi drivers.
The urban taxi driver makes more life and death decisions than a $150,000 per year airline pilot, and yet the driver flies alone and gets paid little more than the allowable minimum.
The taxi driver is, at one and the same time, victim and potential threat.
He is often abused, verbally and sometimes physically, by passengers, fellow drivers, the police, and passing strangers in the grip of a bad day.
Back, during the Golden Age of taxi driving, I drove a taxi cab on the night shift in San Francisco.
During my years behind the wheel, the taxi cab became my office.
I think that possibly driving is what Americans do best.
We rush about year after year thinking that it is the job, the position, the acquisition of stuff that is all important, when in actuality that is mere fluff; mental doodling with which to distract the ego while the really important work is the driving, and acquiring the skill and focus to do it really well.
Driving a taxi, I often found that after about six hours in the driver’s seat a strange phenomena would begin to occur.
No sense of movement, totally centered, no sense of motion or even thought.
At such times that moment of clarity is often reported-just before the crash.
Driving a taxi, at least in San Francisco, is an ongoing experiment in self discovery.
He spends perhaps sixty seconds with an authority figure receiving the waybill and small metal taxi medallion like some sort of unholy communion wafer, and then he is out on the streets, on his own-FREE! No boss, no supervisor, no one to tell him what to do.
For self-originating sorts of individuals who have more need of freedom than money and position, the art of Vehicular Tai Chi as practiced by driving a taxi can be very worthwhile.
The whirring of the tires on the late night asphalt, the blur of pedestrian faces through the glass often induced in me a blissful vacancy of mind that has no real equivalent in civilian life.
For me, driving cab was part martial arts, part meditative practice, and part graduate school; sort of a graduate school of mind.
During my years of focused concentration behind the wheel I became a practitioner of what I call Motor Zen.
Taxi driving very closely approximates the formal practice of Zazen.
The driver has his seat cushion, his formal sitting position and in place of the white meditation screen he has the white city backdrop and instead of a Zen koan he has the mindless chatter from the rear seat and the endless circuits around and around the city…for ten hours at a time, looking for meaning.
The price for inattention is often the destruction of the vehicle within which the body resides; sometimes even the body itself.
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