You younger people may want to get your “Okay, Boomer” locked and loaded before I start, because you may have ample opportunity to fire it. You’ve been warned. In the summer of 1977, I took driver’s ed in high school. Now, even before the pandemic, driver’s ed seems to be done from home, in conjunction with information from your insurance company. Aside from a mailbox (son) and drainage ditch and trailer hitch (daughter), my kids have been successfully plying the roads for over a decade, so there might be something to it. BTW, did anyone else think “drainage ditch and trailer hitch” would be a great name for a melancholy country song? No? Who asked you, anyway! When I took driver’s ed, we had classroom, simulator, and driving as elements of our instruction. Our simulators were based on old (maybe newish when they were built) Chryslers, the kind with pushbutton transmission selectors. Nowadays, many cars have a knob in the console to select gears. Side note- I’m too stupid to drive most modern cars. I may get it started, possibly moving, but adjusting the seat or tuning the “sound system” are bridges too far, if you’re picking up what I’m putting down. Part of our driving practice was tooling around the school parking lot, honing our parallel parking skills, three point turns, and backing up. My friend and I were in a ’76 Pontiac Grand Prix, a sweet rig for a fifteen year old. Apparently, blasting the AC and cranking the tunes were strictly verboten. Our teacher, Berle Cohen, summarily ran across the parking lot and screamed at us.
Mr. Cohen wore many other hats in addition to the driver’s ed crash helmet. He taught some other classes of some sort and coached sports of some kind. I’m a little hazy on the particulars. One thing I do remember, crystal clear, was his admonition to “IPDE”. We also watched a short film to reinforce this principle. What is IPDE? Identify, Predict, Decide, Execute. This is a solid life strategy, applicable in many facets of everyday living. You do it all the time, even without realizing it. You identify the lady outside of Target with the clipboard. You predict that she will ask inane questions, possibly requesting that you to sign a petition to annex parts of Canada, the parts like France, not us. You decide that time is money, and yours is not for sale. You then execute, feigning an important call as you hold your phone to your ear and shrug. While riding my bike on the Cross Seminole Trail today, I was IPDEing all over the place, still hearing Mr. Cohen’s voice.
Failing to IPDE can lead to some undesirable results. Spiritually speaking, IPDEing is of utmost importance.
Do you IPDE with intentionality, spiritually speaking?
(Click “Stand On Firmer Ground” for a deeper look into IPDE)