The notebook · September 8, 2026

The passenger seat

I noticed it this summer and it has been working on me since. The only times I pray without effort, without pushing myself, without checking how long it is taking, are the times somebody else is driving.

Not on a train, oddly. On a train I work, or pretend to, or look at things on my phone. It is in a car, in the passenger seat, with someone at the wheel and road ahead. Something loosens there, and I start speaking to God the way you speak to someone sitting behind you.

For a long time I put that down to being available. I told myself I knew how to pick up the empty stretches, that I did not let them go to waste. It was flattering and it more or less held.

Except that I can see now what those moments have in common, and it is not my availability. It is that there is no lever. The journey takes as long as it takes. I cannot speed it up, I cannot decide to stop, I do not even pick the lane. It is not that I am giving that time. It was taken from me, and you do not put in a claim for what was taken.

And I notice that this is exactly the arrangement in which I stop negotiating. When I drive, I calculate. When I am waiting for an answer, I go and see whether it has come. When a thing can still be pulled forward by a quarter of an hour through some effort of mine, I spend the whole hour hunting for that quarter of an hour.

Psalm 130 has a line I have started saying on those journeys. It is about people keeping watch at night.

My soul longs for the Lord more than watchmen long for the morning; more than watchmen for the morning.

Psalm 130:6 (World English Bible)

What holds me is that the line is said twice, and the second time it loses its verb. The watchmen do not even long any more, they are just there, still turned toward the morning. Nothing they do brings the morning any closer, and the psalm finds no particular merit in them for that.

There is a generous reading of all this: I would be someone who knows how to receive what is given. There is another, less pleasant one: I only pray calmly where not praying would gain me nothing. The second seems truer to me. I also notice that I like it, that severity, and a severity you like is suspect.

What I have not found is what to do on the days when I am the one driving.

In Manna, one prayer a day, roughly the length of a red light.