Jump in the Car, No Time to Explain

There are moments when life behaves like a slightly chaotic colleague, standing in your driveway with the engine on, the window down, holding a coffee that has seen things, saying, “Jump in the car, no time to explain.” Not cinematic. Not destiny-shaped. More like: we’re late, I’m confused, but I trust you.

You hesitate, naturally. You think about your calendar, your inbox, your emotional bandwidth, the fourteen browser tabs negotiating your attention like a small, polite union. You put on the wrong jacket. It contains old receipts and one identity you no longer fully support. Then, sometimes, you get in.

Important work decisions almost never arrive as confidence. They arrive as nervous curiosity wearing a borrowed coat, shaped like sentences such as “this might be a bad idea,” “we can undo it,” or the most dangerous one: “let’s just try.” All emotionally illegal. All strangely effective.

Work is work. It is not a quest. It is people, timing, documents, slight misunderstandings, big misunderstandings, and payment reminders written by software that has never felt shame. And still, inside this ordinary machinery, something happens. You get better at apologizing. You get faster at noticing when something is off. You stop panicking at the first draft of anything. Not heroic progress, just background progress, like software updates you did not approve but secretly needed.

In adventure stories, the call comes from fate. In real life, it comes from someone on your team saying, “Are you around for a quick thing?” and suddenly you are. Not ready, not certain, but present. That’s the real vehicle.

We notice what breaks: the weird call, the quiet no, the project that aged you three years emotionally and paid for half a chair. We don’t notice what slowly stabilizes: that mistakes no longer feel fatal, that rejection now fits in one pocket, that some problems turned out to be loud but hollow.

Progress is shy. It leaves sticky notes instead of speeches.

This is where the man of seriousity lives. Not dramatic. Not inspirational. Reliable. Someone who shows up, keeps promises he made while tired, googles things he definitely knows, and occasionally considers deleting everything and opening a bookstore for people who don’t like bookstores. But he stays. Because other people stayed too.

Because someone else is already in the car, pretending not to be nervous, adjusting the radio, leaving space for your bag and your uncertainty.

I’m grateful for that. For unclear plans shared between decent people. For work that didn’t save us but shaped us gently. For projects that were mostly emails, yet taught us how to listen, how to pause, how not to disappear when things wobble.

So if something in your life is quietly saying now, without slides, without certainty, without a logo, you don’t have to be brave. Just be cooperative and pack some patience.

Stay in the car.