Driving and swimming. Do it.
I met someone earlier this year who does not know how to drive or swim.
“I live in New York City,” she said. “I don’t need to do either.”
She is free to live her life in any way she sees fit, but I am of the opinion that regardless of your geographic position, you should learn to drive a car and swim. Both strike me as prerequisites to being an adult, akin to learning to use a spoon and tie your shoes. The inability to do either is ridiculous and will likely create problems, or worse, lost opportunities in the future.
Both also strike me as exceptionally limiting in nature.
Even if you live in New York City and have access to public transportation at all times, what happens when you leave the city? You want to see the Grand Canyon, so you take public transportation to JFK Airport and fly to Colorado, but then what?
Take a bus to the Grand Canyon? Hail an Uber?
There will be times when driving will be necessary if you want to move around in this world. You can either constantly depend on the kindness of friends and family, or you can learn a skill that isn’t all that hard to master.
“I live in New York City. I don’t need to do either,” is also a ridiculous statement made by someone who can’t see past their nose and imagine a life unlike the one they are currently living.
Yes, it’s true. She may live in New York City for the rest of her life, but how many of us have thought something certain and immutable about our lives only to discover things have entirely changed just a few years later? The assumption that you will want or be able to live in one place for your entire existence is also ridiculous. The future is unknown, and our expectations for the next five, ten, or twenty years are rarely realized.
Learn to drive because life is unknowable.
Learn to drive, even if you can reliably depend on public transportation, because you just never know when you won’t be able to anymore.
And learn to swim, too, because drowning sucks.
Also, spending your entire life avoiding rivers, lakes, oceans, pools, and maybe even boats is just silly. Like driving, swimming is a skill that isn’t difficult to master, and learning to do so opens up a world of opportunity and a lifetime of increased safety.
Driving and swimming:
Prerequisites for living a fruitful life, I think.
