For a kid who moves from house to house and city to city, the car is their stable unit. For Annie Leibovitz, the car became the way she experienced the world. Her backseat window was her picture frame, and it is this frame that would later inspire her passion for photography. Annie said she preferred to do her interviews in the car, because when she drove, her mind was free.
There is a connectivity between driving and meditation, between letting the body steer and the mind relax. The body, when put in a routine, recognized position, will move into a kind of autopilot. It is as if the body knows the mind needs to drift when the mind itself is too jumbled to come to such a supposition. There are some instants where the mind, constantly perceiving and concluding, needs to be, needs to merely exist outside itself for a few moments… And that is where the body comes in. Driving is like meditating. The body takes over while the mind is able to embrace a rare clarity. Similarly, as Annie Leibovitz suggests, driving is one of the few places my mind can experience this kind of freedom. For someone as established, experienced, traveled, and matured as Annie Leibovitz, I can imagine having a free mind is exceptionally infrequent. To have a free mind is to experience stillness, to feel the grace of serenity, the silk of peace. Sometimes when I feel so upset, angry, or overwhelmed, there seems to be no “out” to the hold my emotions have over me. Consequently I feel stuck, caught in the mess of my own mind. When this confusion, this mental cluster forces its way into my mentality, I often get the urge to drive. Sometimes I drive, sometimes I stay put and crawl into bed. However, when I do wander the roads, I come back to my apartment with a different frame of mind. I think driving allows me to see beyond myself. Rather than force myself to interact with my own thoughts, driving forces me to interact with people, with society, with the world. I see other people, and I am able to see my life within the context of others. While of course my thoughts and emotions are significant, sometimes a drive helps me place them in the right order on my list of priorities. I realize I am a fraction of this world, and driving helps me further realize that I want my fraction to be positive, progressive, and loving, not negative, stagnant, and brooding. For all the times I have wished my mind would go blank, being behind the wheel helps me get there. Rather than see things through my own eyes, my car provides me with another layer, another lens to see the beautiful complexities of life outside my own mind.
Annie utilizes her whole life as a subject for her artwork, and I find that inspiring. It can become easy to pick and choose the moments of life that one thinks are significant enough to document or discuss. Annie’s life, however, makes it clear that every moment matters and that it is in fact the moments between all the significant, document-worthy events that form the foundation for one’s life, the glue for one’s worldview, and the basis for one’s personal poesis.
