Life Lesson from a Cabby: Sleep with the Ghosts

This post can also be found at StrangerSage.com.

Last night was cold in the Windy City. It was 3 a.m. and I was headed home from a holiday party in the back seat of a warm cab as it swerved and zipped down slick and snowy streets. Manning the wheel was Mir, a man from Hyderabad, India who was about to repeat a mantra I have heard and tried to live by for years. The gist is this: "Quit being such a pansy". Frank Hebert puts it more eloquently in his litany against fear, but we'll keep it simple.

What prompted a lecture from the cabby to the crybaby? I asked Mir, a man with 30 years driving experience who had weathered not only the snow-slicked streets of Chicago in an 18-wheeler, but also India's lawless, helter-skelter roadways, to "slow it down, please. I'm afraid of winter driving."

"Afraid?!" asked Mir as he barely missed the late-night drunkards trying to hail him down in the middle of the street, too inebriated to notice or care that the light atop the car wasn't lit. "Never let yourself be afraid. Never! It will stay with you until you die!"

Whoa, there, Cabby, let's not get too intense here -- I'm one eggnog short of a bad morning ahead. But on he went, after I explained that I had been crashed into a few times due to people losing control in bad weather. Admittedly, it is a fear that shakes me to the core, keeps me off the roads at the first sign of sleet, and elicits backseat driver behaviour that might be equated to what you would see if the Jonas Brothers announced to their fanbase they're all gay.

"Say there is a house, and it is full of demons." (Really, Mir? Okay, going with it ...) "I go into that house, and I sleep in it. I sleep with the ghosts, because I am the one with power. I am in control, next to God -- unless I let myself be afraid."

So it's a bit conflated, but I "got" it. Something about the way he said it made me realize how ridiculous I was being, and how -- even when we think we've embraced a tenet fully -- sometimes we need to do a little philosophical maintainence.