mylsolved and the Art of Driving Away

You spend so much of your life trying to solve problems. You fill out forms, you chase connections, you log in to portals hoping that the answer to your burnout is just a password away. You open your laptop, type in mylsolved, and you wait for the system to verify that you are, in fact, you. But the problems that keep you up at night? The really heavy ones? They don't care about your login credentials. They require a different kind of motion.

I learned to drive in a parking lot that looked out onto a highway. My father, a man of very few words, simply said, "The car goes where you look. If you stare at the wall, you'll hit the wall." It was the most profound thing he ever said, and he said it while gripping the "oh shit" handle above the passenger door. He was talking about driving, but he was also talking about everything. Where you fix your gaze, you will eventually end up.

There is a specific kind of therapy that happens at 70 miles per hour. It’s the therapy of forced focus. When the world is blurring past your side window, you can't afford to spiral. You have to watch the road. You have to check your blind spot. The car demands a presence that the rest of your life rarely asks for. In an office, you can stare at a wall for an hour and no one notices. In a car, that gets you a tow truck and a insurance claim.

I think about the road trips we take to clear our heads. We pack a bag, we fill the tank, and we just go. We are chasing the horizon, hoping that the distance between Point A and Point B will stretch the tension out of our shoulders. It rarely solves the problem, but it solves the feeling of being trapped. The car becomes a mobile cage, yes, but at least it’s a cage you are steering. You have the illusion of control, and sometimes, that illusion is enough to get you through the night.

And then there is the radio. The algorithm of the highway. You scan through stations, catching snippets of lives that aren't yours—a preacher in one state, a baseball game in another, a Spanish love song that makes you feel nostalgic for a romance you never had. It is a reminder that the world is wide and your specific crisis is just one tiny frequency in a vast spectrum of static. The car hums, the tires drone, and for a moment, you are just a point moving through space. You don't need to log in. You don't need to prove you exist. You just need to keep your hands on the wheel and your eyes on the vanishing point.