My Jeep started running funny the other day.
It was idling kind of different…surging….running a little bit hotter than usual.
It wasn’t anything really profound. It was still running…had good power…started right up when I got ready to go again.
I talked to some older friends sitting on their front porch when I brought their mail by…
“My Jeep’s running funny…”
“Sometimes you just have to run them hard…take it out on the highway for a while…” was the answer from the porch.
By the time I finished the route and drove it into town to the mechanic so I could ask him about it, the car was running like usual. No problems that the mechanic could help me with…it just needed to be blown out on the highway a little.
Here’s an LJ Booth song that I like quite a bit.
That’s probably one of the things I appreciate about running…it really helps to “blow the carbon” out of my head.
Something about repetition and focusing on something other than a swirling thought process….it seems to do me good.
I have other things in my life that do that…just hanging out with my family….(vacations! I need another nice vacation)…playing some music…watching a good movie.
I guess there’s probably more things that let me calm down and clean up the chatter in my brain.
I seek peace…I really do…even if I don’t always know where to look.
That was the funny thing about that Jeep the other day. It wasn’t running all that rough…just different enough to draw my attention…but it was all I could think about.
(One of the things that really set me off was when I looked at the coolant in the overflow tank. It had turned dark brown and I was sure that I’d blown a head gasket or some other such horrible thing had occurred. When I got to the mechanic, I wasn’t too proud to tell him that I figured out that dark glasses might have been the reason for my “new perspective”.)
I wonder how many days I’ve wasted because I couldn’t get my mind off a problem that kept getting bigger the more attention I gave it?
If I’m really going to be “diligent”, I’m going to know about every potential problem under the sun. I’ll know what every tick in the engine means, why a few extra degrees of running temperature on a hot day could be the end, why a shimmy or a new shake is all about impending disaster.
I will catalog every bad thing that could happen…and then strain to listen for the smallest clue that its time may be coming soon.
Sometimes I wonder if the philosophy of “dude, just crank up the Bob Marley on the stereo….you won’t have to listen to the car falling apart” might be the best way to handle all of the angst.
No wheels have fallen off yet…I still “keep it between the fence posts” like my Dad used to say.