Please drive more slowly around school children

When I was seventeen and first allowed to drive, I drove too fast. I was in half a dozen crashes, mostly single vehicle, before I realised I was driving beyond my ability, not to mention outside the bounds of safety. I didn’t kill anyone, and for this I am grateful. The reason I’m confessing my shameful driving history here is that I’m about to give a little lecture, something I promised myself I wouldn’t do in these pages, and before I start, I want to put on record that I’ve been in the bloody idiot camp when it comes to being in charge of a motor vehicle. And now, to the lecture.

I read recently that so many drivers are speeding in school zones the State Government is considering stiffer penalties for breaches. Over 300 drivers were clocked at between 70 and 80kph in 40kph-limited school zones in the last year in Queensland, and 43 drivers were clocked at over 80kph. While the seventeen-year-old me would be blithe in the face of these numbers, happily accelerating, the mother-of-an-eleven-year-old me finds them hard to believe. Surely not, I think, not around a school where on any day I might see six year olds on scooters bunny-hopping from the footpath to the gutter, toddlers running suddenly, unexpectedly out on to the road, my son and his buddies so unaware of cars they cavort down the street throwing a ball.

I worked on a review of school transport safety some years back, and one of the more gruesome pieces of research we looked at related to speed and the likelihood of fatal injury when it comes to hitting pedestrians. In summary, when you drive even a little faster, you become much more likely to kill the pedestrian you hit. At 30kph, it’s five per cent likely. At 50kph – a speed 100 drivers a day are caught doing in school zones – the likelihood increases sharply, to 40 per cent. At 70kph, the speed one driver a week is caught travelling in school zones, you are 80 per cent likely to kill a pedestrian you hit, and at 80kph, the speed 43 drivers were caught travelling, it’s almost 100 per cent. If you think you can stop in time when a child does something unexpected, as children will do no matter what their parents and teachers tell them, you’re wrong. You can’t stop. You can’t even slow down. Maybe you were rushing somewhere important, maybe you arrived on time, but it’s dumb luck that you weren’t the person who met the six year old on the scooter, the toddler on foot, the ten year old who chased a ball, you weren’t the one who’ll have to live the rest of life, knowing.

When I was in primary school, an older brother of one of the kids in my class used to pick his younger siblings up in the afternoon. There were no school speed limits in those days. Cars came into school grounds. Three o'clock was crazy, dangerous, although none of us knew it. The kids in my class, including me, thought the big brother was really someone, driving a car like a grownup. He had a thatch of blond hair and big hands and he drove a light blue Holden Kingswood. One rainy day, he hit and killed a grade 1 boy. As an adult, I’ve often thought of him, that big blond boy, how his life must have turned on that one experience.

How do you tell someone else to take care? My younger self – the one who sped through stop signs with abandon – wouldn’t have listened to the bleating me now anyway, would have laughed in the face of the statistics on speed and death, would have assumed she was immune to harm and harming. I suspect drivers of any age who speed in school zones won’t read this or care, and maybe they don’t even realise what they risk. If stiffer penalties will work, I’m all for them. A short prison sentence might be a good start, together with an enormous fine and a naming in the paper with a very big photo. If that’s what it takes, I say, bring it on.

Based on the column published in The Courier-Mail Qweekend  on 12 October 2013. I write mainly about writing, education, birth, health and the thrill of parenting. You can Get in touch,  tick the box to receive emails, Like Writer Mary-Rose MacColl on Facebook or follow MaryRoseMacColl on Twitter. Have a great day!

Learning to MEDDDDDDITTTTTTTATE!!!

I've never been able to meditate. I don’t have the meditation gene. I am pathologically incapable of sitting still. Instead of noticing my thoughts non-judgementally from a calm centred place within, I’ve always preferred to become my thoughts and skitter off, mostly into regrets about the past or some future catastrophe, propping myself up, getting right into my big juicy ego to confirm that I EXIST!!!

My inability to still my mind – what I prefer to call my gift of lateral thinking (baha) – didn’t start in adulthood. It’s been a gift my whole life. In kindy, when they had rest time for those nine hours after lunch, my cot was in an isolated room so that I wouldn’t interrupt others as I told stories to myself. In school, I spent more time outside than inside classrooms. I grew up with what I would say was a severe meditation handicap.

In fact, I’ve probably put more energy into finding out how to meditate than actually meditating if it comes down to it. I did a yoga course in a proper ashram in my twenties. I didn’t relax, not even in corpse pose. In my thirties, I bought a book by a Buddhist nun, Pema Chodron, called When Things Fall Apart, that had meditation instructions involving the posture, the eyes and the hands. It was a good book but the meditating nearly sent me crazy. I found myself hating Pema Chodron unreasonably. Then I did a course with a meditation expert in Canada, after which I made myself sit for twenty minutes every day for a week. It was excruciating. I can’t tell you how excruciating. Imagine being at the dentist without anaesthetic during a root canal and you’ll start getting the idea.

The Buddhists call it the monkey mind and the name fits for me. My mind is a monkey. I’ve always told myself that it helps me write (she said) because it will make unexpected connections among seemingly unrelated facts (even I don’t believe that). It goes from one thing to another to another without ever stopping to rest or consider. It’s constant and exhausting… and I’m completely addicted. The internet has made it so much easier to indulge my monkey mind. I can check social media, see whether baby George has burped today and be into a story on the future of feminism, all before breakfast.

I’d consigned meditation to the great big bin of life lessons that just don’t work for me, along with running, sewing and civil engineering. But then came this year when my life revved up a gear in terms of personal stresses. When I woke one morning after another night of only an hour’s sleep, in which I dreamed I was going on a trip but oh dear, I haven’t packed and the car I need to drive to the airport is locked in the parking garage and ooh, I don’t have a passport, and goodness, the plane’s leaving in twenty minutes and I won’t be on it – I knew I needed to do something. And then, through a writing buddy, I lucked onto a site called My Diamond Days. It’s run by another Brisbane writer Kathy Wilson who has her own cracker story about why she started meditating that makes my sleeplessness look churlish – but that’s for another day. For a small monthly fee, My Diamond Days sends me an email every morning with a ‘guided’ meditation, which is someone talking to me or playing music while I sit (or mostly, frankly, lie down) and do what I’m told.

My Diamond Days isn’t for everyone, but it works for me because I’m paying a fee which the Scot in me won’t waste but also because of the mixed bag of meditations, everything from Sri Sri to ocean sounds. For me and my little monkey, this is the appeal. Meditation’s like a box of chocolates. I never know what I’m going to get. I’ve been doing my ten minutes a day for over a month now. I’m sleeping better and finding I’m just a little bit more focused at work. And occasionally, just occasionally, I sail off into a zone between waking and sleep where anything is possible, even peace.

Based on the column published in The Courier-Mail Qweekend  on 5 October 2013. I write mainly about writing, education, birth, health and the thrill of parenting. You can Get in touch,  tick the box to receive emails, Like Writer Mary-Rose MacColl on Facebook or follow MaryRoseMacColl on Twitter. Have a great day!

Road rage, ride rage and the case for more kindness

I met a Canadian cyclist this week while waiting for traffic lights to change near the riverside bikeway. I’d just decided not to cross  on the flashing DON’T WALK, a good choice as it turned out, as the light against me turned green. “This is such a good city for cycling,” the Canadian said, pointing to the bikeway opposite us. “Except for your bikers. They’re so full of rage. Why is that?” It’s a good question. I blame cars.

I took up cycling again as an adult because I hate driving, or at least I hate waiting in traffic. I can get almost everywhere my work takes me – the city, the State Library, three bookstores and half a dozen coffee shops – more quickly on my bike than in a car, most of it on that pleasant riverside path. But forced at times to use the roads, I quickly learned that some drivers disregard cyclists, ignorantly or even maliciously cutting you off, travelling too close or yelling abuse. Last year I got knocked by a car that was pulling out of a parking spot– it took months for my back and shoulder to work properly again –  and the driver seemed more concerned I might sue than about anything else.  While I realised car drivers might not like bike riders, I always thought other bikers would be my chums. I was wrong.

I meet a writing buddy for coffee once a week. We have a range of cafes north and south of the river. My buddy walks, I bike. But at this time of year, two of our cafes become untraversable because of the cyclists, mostly male, who descend like plagues of lycra, their backs advertising toothpaste companies, financial institutions or restaurants, their shoes – socks on the outside – clattering on the cobbles as they join the queue. They carry coins in small ziploc bags which their gloved fingers have trouble opening. When they sit down, having ordered their complicated coffees, they talk about bicycle parts. If you smile at them, they don’t smile back.

They’re in teams, and I know feeling part of a team can be rewarding, but when they’re riding, their teams turn into packs, which is not so good. I’m not in a pack. I don’t wear lycra. Until a few months ago, my bike was a 1987 Trek. I don’t cycle fast and perhaps that makes me a target, the Piggy of the Lord of the Flies biking world. When I see one of those packs coming towards me in the opposite direction on the bikeway and I hear that now familiar chorus of “Bike! Bike! Bike!” shouted down the line like “Brace! Brace! Brace!” in a plane, I panic. They pull in at the last minute, sometimes yelling something I won’t repeat here. Yes, they frighten me, especially once my son was old enough to come along on rides. He’d totter into the wrong lane just before a flying giant would almost collect him, with more of those words I won’t repeat. But they are afraid too, and well they might be.

When I feel like meeting their cycling aggression with aggression, I remember the worst case of ride rage I ever saw. I was on foot one hot day at Brisbane’s suburban Milton near a busy fiveways. I watched a cyclist pedal hard to catch up with a car stopped at a red light, drop his bike on the footpath, wrench open the back door of the car and proceed to encourage a passenger to engage in fisticuffs. The light changed to green not a moment too soon and the car sped off, the door still open, the cyclist only then beginning to shake uncontrollably, sinking to the ground near me, starting to cry. His rage spent, he looked completely deflated, although people were still giving him a wide berth. The car had nearly hit him, he told me in between sobs, and the boys in the back had laughed. I stayed with him until he’d stopped crying.

No matter how aggressive they are, cyclists are more vulnerable to cars than car drivers are to bicycles. For this reason if no other, the weight and mass differential, those who drive cars ought to be the kinder and more patient of the two. 

Based on the column published in The Courier-Mail Qweekend  on 28 September 2013. I write mainly about writing, education, birth, health and the thrill of parenting. You can Get in touch,  tick the box to receive emails, Like Writer Mary-Rose MacColl on Facebook or follow MaryRoseMacColl on Twitter. Have a great day!