Chaos and mindfulness in flow
I am a very mindful driver. For me driving is an exercise in flow and self-organization and I even see it as a bit of a giving practice.
So I was intensely interested when my friend Kathryn Thompson told me of an article entitled “Why don’t we do it in the road? recently published in Salon, which talks about how to make streets safer by removing controls.
“One of the characteristics of a shared environment is that it appears chaotic, it appears very complex, and it demands a strong level of having your wits about you,” says U.K. traffic and urban design consultant Ben Hamilton-Baillie, speaking from his home in Bristol. “The history of traffic engineering is the effort to rationalize what appeared to be chaos,” he says. “Today, we have a better understanding that chaos can be productive.”
In the past, in this space, I posted a video of traffic in India which demonstrates this point.
Chaos does make us more mindful. We make better choices in more chaotic environments because we pay much closer attention to the subtleties of what is happening around us. You cannot be on your cellphone, or talking to others or letting your mind wander when you are driving in unregulated traffic. You have to use all of the capacities that every driving instructor tries to teach you when you are sixteen. Pay attention, anticipate, leave space and be careful. Good advice for a chaotic world.
Something very interesting happens when we take away the fixed rules and other cruthces that remove our need to be fully present.
Similar story here: http://positivesharing.com/2005/01/shared-space-in-traffic-and-at-work/
Under (extreme or otherwise) circumstances of survial, we change accordingly to move with the flow. Under these conditions we invent new things ways and beliefs. You look at the history of Europe. They destroyed everything in the enviroment, uprooted it, or morphed it, and this caused them to invent new machines and ideas. They mentality traveled the world, and has brought us to this way of life where, not only are we trying to fix the mistakes with bigger and better technology, but also new ways to survive in somthing we caused.
Also, it is when we break out of the comfort zone, we truly begin to grow.
[I’ll leave it to you to figure it out how this relates to your post…lol]
Thanks Alex.
OMR…this is about the fixing mentality, which is alos about control, so it relates to what I’m saying. The western European worldview is to see everything as a problem that can be solved by specific solutions, usually by exerting controls over variables in the system.
I think the lesson is more letting go and less control, and the cool thing about this traffic experiment is that it shows that in surprising cases, that actually works.
Interesting point. We are trusting our physical well being to a set of lights that we assume will keep other cars from hitting us.
Many times I finish my commute and don’t bother to see if the cross traffic will stop for their red light. On the other hand, when I last drove in Mexico, I was mindful at every intersection. I didn’t have to stop…only adjust my speed to arrive at the intersection when it become clear.