Excerpts of life

How do I tell you what is going on in my life in about 5 minutes?
Well there is an aim to this post and this to reflect on the driving lesson and my poor performance on it. We drive in the morning and this morning again my instructor came, pulled up infron of the small gate in his ligh blue fiat city care. We swapped places and we drove off, slowly because the street is sloped down, so the clutch and the break are both pressed down, the clutch in completely and the break only so far that I can descend safely to the place where I turn into the main road.

I only became aware of the fact that one can pull out of the clutch smothly yet quickly today. I used to pull away ever so slowly and that apparantly translated in me being "too slow for conditions", as it is known technically, according to my driving instructor. My turns were too slow as made my way around the bend within the junction of two roads to begin moving along a road that is perpedicular to the one I was in just moments before.

So this post serves as a way for me to reflect on what I need to do. When I approach the robots, what you call traffic lights in the US and elswhere, I slow down, downgrade and go to first gear to stop at the read light. Cluth and break in. However, I need to just every so slightly lift my foot from the clutch so that I "vibrate" meaning I feel the reverberations from the engine the steering wheel. Then when it is green I go into the gass and the car will move forward while I feel that reving sound and the vibrating subsides, then I can slowly pull away from the clutch. I do this, but too slowly. I am not phlegmatic, no. It is just that today I did not vibrate at the junction of Hendrik Witbooi and Moses Garoeb (look it up on Google Maps for Windhoek), while waiting or the red to turn green. As a result the car that was supposed to give me right off way just turned ahead to left and I went after him. (From his perpsective he was turning right and he was supposed to yield to all incoming traffic, and by the way, we drive on the left side of the road here, as you might have inferred).

I am learning and I have about 4 lessons left before I go to the test. That translates into about 45 minutes per lesson (although they should be an hour long, but my instructor arrives earlier than our agreed time and we drive for less than an hour. It is incumbent on me to speak with him and tell him that he should come at the agreed time. He has never cheated me though, I think I will be able take all those minutes and get an extra lesson, hopefully. I pray he feels better though, he is experiencing leg pain).

I think I can do, YES, I can get the liscence. But as my psychologist said, there are things that are important yet not urgent. My liscence is one of those. I would love to have it as soon as possible and it is certainly not going to become easier to attain it, but I realize it is not urgent. So I will take it easy. I also nearly did not spot a stop sign today! I need to drive alot more to become accustomed to it all, but my confidence should not dwindle when I make "blunders" as Dolly, my instructor says. He is a nice man. There is something I saw in his appearance, that resembled the deamounour of my grandmother, I don't remember what,b ut maybe it was just the way he was looking at road from the drivers seat when I saw him driving with another student another. This sounds weird, but I had to throw it out there.
So I will make sure that I know how to drive when I get my liscence. Driving is no trivial task and nor is safe for the driver or others around him or her. It can be safe. I hope to do it right. In Bulgarian we have a saying called" doing something like the people", napravi go kakto horata which entails doing something like good, decent people would.

Oh Lord I pray for your guidance here. Let my heart not be troubled but strengthed by faith in you, you have already overcome the world (and driving tests).
Pancho