The Zen of Driving - Moving Past Our Mistakes
In my work with older adults and families navigating major life transitions, I’m struck by how often people carry a quiet, heavy burden: the belief that past mistakes define who they are now. Decisions made years—or even decades—ago can feel as present and obstructive as if they happened yesterday.
Yet there is a familiar, everyday experience that offers a very different model for how we might live with our imperfections: the simple act of driving down the road.
While we’re on the road, many of us become impatient with ourselves:
“Why did I make that mistake?”
“Why did I cut that person off?”
“Why wasn’t I paying better attention?”
What’s interesting about driving is that the roadway might be one of the only places in our lives where we truly let mistakes go.
Unless there’s a collision—and most of the time there isn’t—no one really holds us accountable in any lasting way. You may:
Forget to use your blinker
Accelerate too quickly
Glance at your phone
Cut someone off and disturb what could have been their calm, peaceful drive
The other driver is affected, but you keep going. You might briefly acknowledge your mistake to yourself, but if there’s no crash, no direct consequence, you move on. You don’t spend the rest of your day replaying that lane change in your mind.
In a strange way, the road grants us automatic forgiveness. As long as no one is hurt and no cars touch, you’re “fine” — and you act as if you’re forgiven. You continue with your day without marinating in what you did wrong.
What if we approached our everyday mistakes the way we approach minor driving errors?
Notice what happened
Check the “rearview mirror” for real damage
If there is none, reset and move on
Instead of endlessly replaying our missteps, we could allow ourselves to keep driving forward.
Right now, many of us do the opposite. We:
Retell the story of our mistake
Reshape and reframe it in our minds
Throw it out in front of ourselves over and over again, like debris on the road we’re trying to travel
In doing so, we create new obstacles out of old experiences. Our past errors become projectiles that land in our own path, forcing us to swerve, slow down, or stall every time we try to move ahead.
The Cost of Marinating in Our Mistakes
This constant looking back doesn’t necessarily make us safer, wiser, or kinder. More often, it:
Erodes our confidence
Narrows our sense of possibility
Keeps us tied to old versions of ourselves
For many people—especially in later life—what truly holds them back is not the original mistake itself, but the endless retelling of it: the “should haves,” “if onlys,” and “what was I thinking?” that replay in the background of their days.
These stories can shape how we approach retirement, relocation, health changes, caregiving, grief, and even our own end-of-life planning. When we’re busy relitigating old decisions, it becomes much harder to step into new chapters with clarity and self-compassion. So let’s stop looking through the rear view mirror as a reflection of our future.
