You Were Learning When You Messed Up Your Life

Our best lessons can be the most painful ones. It’s okay to mess up.

I was travelling at 70mph down the motorway in an old car, coasting to save money. As I rounded the bend, traffic was stopped up ahead. I pushed the brake and nothing happened. The speedo stayed at 70. That’s 112kph, if that’s what you use. Too fast to literally hit a traffic jam.

If you drive an automatic, you’ll never probably have coasted. Coasting is taking the vehicle out of gear to disconnect the engine and essentially just roll. Old engines were more economical doing this because they didn’t have to provide unnecessary power. It’s frowned upon because it reduces control.

I had seconds to avert a collision that could have landed me in the hospital, at best. I put the car in 3rd gear for some engine braking and reached for the handbrake, the only option I had left. As the car clicked into gear, the footbrake kicked back in, and the car skidded down the wet road towards the stationary two-lane traffic jam ahead.

I was too late. I wasn’t going to stop in time. But the lanes were wide and it looked like I could just about squeeze in between the two back cars, and buy me a few more yards to stop. It worked. I came to a halt right in between the cars at the back of the jam. The middle of three cars on a two-lane road.

The world suddenly felt very quiet and still.

I looked left and right. The drivers looked straight on, too awkward to look at me. They’d have seen me in their mirrors, heard the screech of my tires, and braced themselves for impact. But instead, there I was, sat right in between them in a lane that wasn’t there. It was pretty awkward. Then the traffic moved forward slowly like it was a normal day, and I pulled into a lane and checked my brakes. They worked fine. It dawned on me what had happened.

The engine on this old car had been occasionally failing when idling. Because I’d been coasting, the engine was disengaged and had cut out, cutting the power to the brakes. When I’d put it in third gear, it had jump-started the car and switched the brakes back on. I hadn’t been driving long, and it was a mistake I…

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