I was reading this post http://dashes.com/anil/2011/06/infant-as-boot-camp.html by Anil Dash and it brought me my similar experience when my daughter was born.
I am 34 and a father to a beautiful daughter. And I was extremely bad at driving(or I didn’t how to drive) till last year. This might be hard for somebody from western world to understand but people from developing countries like India will relate to it. Unlike US or Europe, very few kids have access to cars in their teenage years as very few parents own them. Same for myself. So no access to car, means no access to a opportunity to learn to drive. So I ended up never knowing how to actually drive a car till I was 33. And then we have our daughter born last year and she was in the hospital for first weeks and I was visiting her every day morning and evening. This was extremely hard for me. even with a car at home(which I bought couple of years back), I never managed to learn to drive properly. I even went through driving school 2 times but to no use. I couldn’t get the fear of the crazy bangalore traffic out of my mind. My car will stop whenever I took it out, in the middle of the traffic. People honking around me. I will panic and the car keep stopping in the 1st gear – it was a nightmare.
However, while I was making daily trips to the hospital everyday through public transport, I started having this feeling that, for the sake of my daughter, I really need to learn how to drive. Otherwise, if suddenly we need to go to hospital, it’s going to be extremely tough. So I started taking the car out. With my mind totally engrossed in my daughter’s well-being, who was still in the hospital, my attention to the crazy bangalore traffic shifted from my conscious mind to the unconscious mind. I no longer was concerned about the traffic - at least not as much as for my daughter’s well-being. And that’s how I got the enough practice on driving and thus came out of my fear of driving.
Now whenever I am driving, I still wonder how actually this happened.
