Why would a person drive a taxi?

In San Francisco, on the west coast of the United States in the state of California, there is a group of individuals called taxi drivers. For a very small fee, they will be with you in your vehicle. They will transport you wherever you want to go. They will talk, they will listen, they will even carry your luggage. Most of these people are writers, poets, old hippies, recovering drug addicts, out-of-work musicians, or recent immigrants to this wonderful land. Dreamers each and every one; the best and often the brightest fruit left unpicked on the society tree turns to sugar and threatens to rot and stain the ground.

The urban taxi driver makes more life-and-death decisions than a $150,000-a-year airline pilot, yet the driver flies solo and is paid little more than the minimum allowance. He receives no raises, no retirement, no health care or even workers’ compensation and is treated by public and private citizens alike as a felon on probation. The taxi driver is, at the same time, a victim and a potential threat. He is often abused, verbally and sometimes physically, by passengers, fellow drivers, the police, and passing strangers in the middle of a bad day. He doesn’t take ego hits behind the wheel. Any job satisfaction he receives has to be generated from within. He is, in the truest sense, an urban bracero; a fisher of men in mean streets who wears a coat of many cars.

Back in the golden age of taxi driving (between 1975 and 1988), I drove a cab on the night shift in San Francisco. That’s more than 3,000 ten-hour shifts behind the wheel. Everything, I might add, without being vandalized or stolen. During my years behind the wheel, the taxi became my office. I would sit there eight to ten hours a night. I had conversations (sometimes quite intimate) with strangers while the backdrop of one of the most beautiful cities in the world slipped outside. These strangers were waving goodbye to me and putting money in my hand.

I think driving is probably what Americans do best. Here are these terribly vulnerable creatures with complex nervous systems, so prone to fears, insecurities and phobias, plunging seemingly haphazardly encased in 3,500 pounds of steel and plastic. Constantly scanning with his eyes, making intricate hand, foot and eye decisions that result in life-threatening moves executed… AT SPEED! People do this every day in different configurations, some requiring the cooperation of hundreds of vehicles. And yet, people are so casual, so careless with this highly complex ability that they don’t give it a second thought. They even let their KIDS do it armed with cell phones!

Watching the traffic from a high place is like watching a flight of birds harvesting a freshly plowed field. I wonder, does everyone have access to a common super brain? Or maybe there’s a bird brain running all the rest? Obviously, there is more going on here than we have words for today. It seems that perhaps we are growing in ways that we are not aware of. Possibly we are being trained in this seemingly impromptu way for future tasks we haven’t even imagined yet; all the time we keep confusing the medium with the message. We rush year after year thinking that the important thing is the job, the position, the acquisition of things, when in reality they are mere nonsense; mental scribbles to distract the ego while the really important job is driving, and gain the skill and concentration to do it really well.

Driving a taxi, I often found that after about six hours in the driver’s seat, a strange phenomenon began to occur. It was as if I was sitting at home perfectly still, and a holographic projection of The City was flowing around me. No sense of movement, totally focused, no sense of movement or even thought. The closest most people get to this clear zone is when they are about to be involved in an accident. At such times, that moment of clarity, just before the accident, is often reported.

Emotionally, taxi driving is neutral. It’s not oppressive like I imagine working in a factory or in a bank might be and it’s not so exciting that you want to spend your free time and energy on it. It is, as the Buddhists would say, a kind of left-handed job. He allowed me to support myself and yet he didn’t really interfere with my life. He set me… free. He left me enough time and energy to pursue the real interests of my life. With energy, curiosity, and persistence, I discovered that it was quite possible to develop a whole bunch of… other interests.

Driving a cab, at least in San Francisco, is an ongoing experiment in self-discovery. It is an eccentric work that offers very wide parameters. It gives the driver a lot of leeway. It gives you the freedom to reinvent, reimagine (or destroy!) yourself every day. He spends maybe sixty seconds with an authority figure who takes the waybill and the taxi’s little metal medallion like some kind of unholy wafer, and then he hits the streets, alone, for FREE! No boss, no supervisor, no one to tell him what to do. If he doesn’t want to work, he doesn’t have to. But he remembers that this also means that nobody cares what he does. It is a two-edged sword. He can end up drunk every day (many do), behind on his rent, and suffering terribly from the lack of ego satisfaction that occurs in most normal lines of employment. In order to survive and thrive in this type of work environment, one must have a very well defined sense of “who” they are. For the self-initiated type of person who needs freedom more than money and position, the art of Vehicular Tai Chi, as practiced by driving a taxi, can be very valuable.

The hum of tires on the night asphalt, the blur of pedestrians’ faces through the glass often induced me into a blissful mental vacancy that has no real equivalent in civilian life. For me, driving a cab was part martial arts, part meditation practice, and part grad school; a kind of graduate school of the mind. It satisfied my voyeuristic urges, fed my reclusive nature, and inspired me to delve into the “why” of all things.

During my years of focused concentration behind the wheel I became a practitioner of what I call Motor Zen. Taxi driving closely approximates the formal practice of Zazen. The driver has his seat cushion, his formal sitting position and instead of the white meditation screen he has the backdrop of the white city and instead of a Zen koan he has the nonsense talk from the back seat and the circuits endless around and around the city. ..for ten hours straight, searching for meaning. “Why am I doing this?”

But unlike the Zen ashram, Motor Zen carries some serious risks. The price of inattention is usually the destruction of the vehicle in which the body resides; sometimes even the body itself. It is not a simple swing with the stick over the shoulder like in Zendo. And the ‘Makyo’ found in the safety of the meditation hall is nothing compared to the ghosts found on the street, behind the wheel of the speeding metal sled and in the back seat; Not to mention those found in the deepest corners of the mind after a night shift when the seeker lies huddled alone on a cold metal bed, in a small rented room wondering…

for

January burner

(From the eBook Motor Zen, by Jann Burner)