Power Steering
by Gregg Krech
I learned to drive a car in 1970. The fir
st car I drove was our family’s red Pontiac Lemans. It had a radio, leather bucket seats and a convertible roof. It also had power steering. I wasn’t aware of the power steering at the time. And for nearly forty years I haven’t given much thought to power steering, until recently, when the power steering on our van stopped working.
What is power steering? Power steering is a system for reducing the steering effort on vehicles by using an external power source to assist in turning the wheels. How often have you turned your vehicle to pull into a parking lot and thought about how easy that was thanks to your power steering? Our van is a relatively heavy vehicle. It weights about 2,000 lbs. One day my wife mentioned that the steering seemed kind of funny – it was a bit difficult to turn the van. So I tried it myself, and, sure enough, when I tried to turn left on Silver Street, it took a rather demanding effort just to turn the steering wheel a few inches.
The next day I had to back up and turn the car around in our parking area, and this time it was much worse. I had to push the steering wheel, with all my strength, as I backed up to get the wheels to turn. I finally managed to turn the car around and get it down to the road. Once I was going straight, with a bit of speed, there was no problem. The little steering adjustments that we have to make when we’re driving on a relatively straight highway were generally unnoticeable – just like they usually are when everything is working in good order. But then I’d come to a four way stop and want to make a right turn and Whooaaaa! It was like being in the gym and attempting to lift heavy weights.
When I returned home, I looked under the hood, hoping I’d see something obvious, and I did. The plastic reservoir that contains the power steering fluid was empty. You need power steering fluid to make your power steering work. And without the power steering, you can’t really drive very far, unless you just go in a straight line.
Just like cars, our lives have power steering – an external system for helping us turn the wheels. Our life’s power steering is much more pervasive and complex, yet, just as easy to overlook as the power steering in our car. We have refrigerators that keep our food fresh, computers, email that help us communicate with others, contact lenses that help us see clearly and furnaces that keep us warm on chilly winter nights. We have telephones and lawnmowers. We have flush toilets, showers and washing machines. We have mitochondria that reside in our bodies along with enzymes that help us digest food. We have a heart which has beaten regularly since before we were born and never rests.
This vast network supports our lives and makes it possible to do all the things we do and . . . we often don’t even notice it’s there. It’s when a particular component fails that it gets our attention. The electricity goes out, the washing machine breaks, or our antibodies are too weak to heal us from disease. Now we get a taste of what life is like without power steering. So we run around trying to fix the problem. But we need the help of others to do this. In my case there was a broken clamp on the power steering line underneath the car. Thanks to a competent mechanic, the problem was fixed in just a few minutes. That mechanic is actually part of my power steering system, as is the new clamp and the hydraulic lift he used to raise my car in the air (with me in it!).
We begin to live a spiritually aware life when we start to recognize this power steering system. And we deepen our spiritual understanding when we realize that we are not capable of fixing the problem. Even if we are a skilled mechanic, we cannot fix the problem without the proper tools and parts – and without the knowledge that was given to us by others. Our lives are completely dependent on the power steering system. And when something breaks, our lives are dependent on that same system to fix it.
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We tend to think of Buddha or God as a radiant being, dressed in golden robes and looking down upon us from some heavenly place. But lately, my image is of Buddha as a mechanic with oil-stained hands who works night and day in a vast garage to sustain my life. To sustain all life. He works for free, and if we don’t every thank him, it’s not a problem for him. It’s just a problem for us.
Gregg Krech is a leading authority on Japanese Psychology and author of Naikan: Gratitude, Grace and the Japanese Art of Self-reflection (Stone Bridge Press, 2002). This essay is from his forthcoming book, Naikan Self-reflection and the Path of Pure Land Buddhism.
