But we remember something the seminar speaker told us. He said what we write reflects the sum of everything we learned in and out of school, all of what we experienced in life from the moment the doctor slapped our butts and made us cry, all of our conscious and unconscious memories.

That’s a pretty interesting insight. Maybe we could apply that to our driving habits. Why do we drive the way we do? Do we drive like maniacs because we are unconsciously seeking attention as we weren’t hugged enough as a child?

Come to think of it, this may explain some of our personal driving habits or preferences. We remember hearing kuya (when kuya was god to this bunsoy) remark at how skilled the neighbor’s driver was. You hardly feel it when he accelerates, turns or comes to a stop, said kuya. Our neighbor always felt relaxed whenever driven anywhere, we also heard.

When we started to learn to drive that became our goal. Smooth accelerations, turns and stops. Our passengers feeling relaxed at the end of the drive. We still drive that way today – now we call it econo-mode driving. There are downsides though. We learned to drive on an aging Beetle with a bad clutch which resulted in a bad case of clutch-riding habit, something we still have to fully unlearn to this day. And we’ve been described as driving like an old lady (reeeaaaally sloooooowww).

We always had problems at merging lanes when driving to the corner grocery made us sweat buckets even with the Beetle’s tiny electric fan full on. That is until we heard it from the legend himself – Poch Ramirez – on a television program we forget the name of. Poch said the best way for traffic to go through merging lanes is to alternate, or as he put it, zipper into the lane. That’s what we do as best we can at merging lanes to this day. Although it can be difficult with drivers who never heard the zipper lesson from Poch early in their driving lives.

We now can’t remember where we heard or read about how to treat motorcycles or bicycles on the road. Treat them like they were as wide as small cars, imagining an invisible box the size of a mini car around them and never getting close enough to touch that imaginary box. To this day, we have a hard time overtaking bikers because we only can do so when we have enough room to safely get past that imaginary box around them. Although we do wish bikers would also move on the streets like they had imaginary boxes around them.

We seldom heard our father use the horn of his Beetle. We were taught it was rude to indiscriminately honk at anything other than four-legged creatures on the road. The horn is to be used only for emergencies or as a last resort.

Today, our partner has to reach over and honk the horn for us at pedestrians walking like they were doing the HHWW at the park while on congested streets. Our blood pressure also tends to rise when honked at even after we’ve long realized that it’s a reflex action of people who probably learned to drive in Dumaguete.

It may no longer hold true today, but when we were there nearly a couple of decades ago, everyone honked when coming up behind another vehicle as a courtesy to let them know they are there.

The whole point of this column is maybe our old lecturer was right when he said we are all products of what we learn as a child and growing up. This includes what we learn from our father’s knees, our peers, and the people we look up to.

It should be understandable that if you learned to drive from someone who believes that the best drivers are those who could weave in and out of lanes, and win those chicken games at intersections, who think it’s cool to drag race from stoplight to stoplight, you’d be predisposed to driving the same way.

This brings us back to our advocacy to make road safety and traffic rules part of the curriculum of elementary and high schools. We should start them out early on the road to safe motoring.