The Road Beneath and the Horizon Ahead

Today on my way back from school, I forgot my earphones—an inconvenience that left me with no distraction from my thoughts. It’s funny how, without any noise in your ears, you can actually hear yourself think. As I walked, thoughts drifted, and soon I was lost in memories and quiet reflections.

Then something pulled me back. I saw a girl in a car clearly marked as a driving school vehicle. She was trying to turn off the main road into a smaller one, her face painted with that familiar blend of fear and determination. As she approached the corner, she must have misjudged her pedals because suddenly there was a loud screech—her tires halting abruptly, narrowly avoiding a motorcycle that was coming toward the intersection.

I stopped, watching her gather herself, and it took me back to the days when I was learning to drive. I remembered sitting in the driver’s seat with my hands gripping the steering wheel like a lifeline, staring straight ahead—not at the road ahead, but at the piece of asphalt directly in front of the hood. Every time, my dad would get frustrated, urging me to look up, to stop focusing on what was right in front of me and instead look where I was going. “You won’t see what’s coming if you keep staring at the road beneath your feet,” he’d say. At the time, I didn’t understand his frustration. I was looking at the road, wasn’t I? Isn’t that what I was supposed to do?

What I didn’t realize then was that he wasn’t just talking about driving. In the same way I focused on the road just under the hood, I’ve often approached life the same way. Whether I’m walking, running, riding a bike, or driving, I tend to look down—at the ground beneath my feet. Always focused on the immediate, the tangible, the now. And like that girl in the driving school car, I’d often find myself startled, unprepared for what was coming.

As I stood there watching her, I realized why. When I was a child, I used to trip constantly on the school grounds. The uneven cobblestones were a minefield, and I fell down more times than I could count. One day, after tending to yet another skinned knee, my mother sternly warned me, “Never take your eyes off the ground. Watch where you’re going.” I took her words literally, and from that day forward, I kept my eyes glued to the ground beneath me, always watching my step.

And there it was—the habit I had unknowingly carried into my adult life. I became so focused on what was right in front of me, on the present moment, that I forgot to look ahead. I forgot to envision the bigger picture, the road that stretched beyond where my feet were planted. In that moment, as I watched the girl regain her composure and continue her driving lesson, I saw a parallel between that piece of advice from my mother and how I’ve approached life itself.

There’s a balance to be struck here—a delicate dance between the now and the future. If you spend all your time looking down, focused on the immediate, you’ll miss what’s ahead. But if you only look ahead, lost in the horizon of possibility, you might stumble over the very ground you’re standing on. The trick is to find balance—to be aware of where you are, while keeping an eye on where you're headed.

The lesson I’ve learned, in driving and in life, is that both perspectives are necessary. You need to be aware of your current surroundings, the present moment, but you can’t lose sight of what’s coming. You have to look ahead to advance, but not so far ahead that you forget where you are.

So, maybe the moral here is simple: Find balance. Do the best you can with where you are now, and trust that the road ahead will reveal itself in time. And when you do that—when you look both at the present and at the horizon—you’ll realize that you’re doing just fine. Everything else? That’s not up to you.

We’re all just learning to drive through life, after all.