Towards the end of Daniel McIvor's play “Marion Bridge,” one of the three sisters slips into a monologue about driving. I can't quote the passage exactly, but it contains a line like this: “After a while, you and the road and the truck become one.”
        I remember the line, because that's also my experience of long-distance driving.
        Admittedly, I grew up in the car-besotted 1950s. Perhaps that prejudices my views. But I rarely get tired driving. (I'm tired the next day, but that's a different issue.)
        The rumble of tires on the pavement, the whisper of wind outside, the growl of the engine, the highway unfurling before me – all these combine in a kind of mantra, like telling beads on a rosary, that clears from my mind the stress of deadlines, the tensions of personality conflicts, the worries about health or money or…
        The problems aren't solved, but shelved.
        For the moment, as McIvor wrote, I and the road and the car become one.
        It's not road hypnosis. I'm not lulled into torpor. I'm wide awake, fully aware of the world around me. But instead of being isolated from it, I'm integrated with it.
        This doesn't work in heavy traffic, of course. Which is probably why one of my recurring nightmares, which I still have occasionally, deals with some variation on driving in Toronto.

Eastern parallels
        Long-distance driving on an open road, however, feels like a technological equivalent of some eastern meditative practices.
        Physicist Fritjof Capra described the experience well in his 1975 book, “The Tao of Physics”:
        “I was sitting by the ocean one late summer afternoon, watching the waves rolling in and feeling the rhythm of my breathing, when suddenly I became aware of my whole environment as being engaged in a gigantic cosmic dance. Being a physicist, I knew that the sand, rocks, water and air around me were made of vibrating molecules and atoms, that these consisted of particles which interacted with one another by creating and destroying other particles. ...
        “All this was familiar to me from my research in high-energy physics, but until that moment I had only experienced it through graphs, diagrams, and mathematical theories.
        “As I sat on that beach ... I 'saw' the atoms of the elements and those of my body participating in the cosmic dance of energy; I 'felt' its rhythm and 'heard' its sound, and at that moment I knew that this was the Dance of Shiva, the Lord of the Dancers worshipped by the Hindus.”
        I get frustrated by those who insist that mystical experiences must fit some prescribed format. Hildegard of Bingen and the biblical prophet Ezekiel both, apparently, suffered from migraine headaches; Julian of Norwich gazed at a hazelnut in the palm of her hand; Capra sat on a beach; I sit behind a steering wheel.
        What matters is not the means of achieving that altered state of consciousness, but the awareness – and the awe – of discovering universal unity.