Conscious driving

Today, I picked up a book I haven't looked at for some years but that I've always really valued. It is The Three Minute Meditator by David Harp. Thumbing through it, my eye fell on this exercise:

Driving is one of the most hazardous things we do on a daily basis. Yet often, as we drive, our mind is lost in the past or the future, far from a clear focus on the manipulation of tons of iron at high rates of speed. We talk, listen to the radio, eat, drink or smoke, keeping "half an eye" on the road and other traffic.

In conscious driving, we focus our attention exclusively on the elements important to automotive safety, asintently as though we were Monte Carlo racing drivers, participating in the race of our lives. But intead of concentrating on speed alone, we pay attnetion to many factors: the road in front of us, the positionsof other cars near us, our speed, driving conditions, and road conditions.

Should any thoughts not germane only to safe driving enter, we notice them and gently return our attention to our driving. If this exercise seems, for any reason, to be unsafe, please don't do it. but I am convinced that if more people did focuse their attention exclusively on their driving, that the highways would be much safer places.

Of course, this was written before cell phones hit the scene so today we have that distraction as well as the ones Harp has mentioned here. What would happen if we all decided to practice conscious, or mindful, driving? We would actually get in a lot more mindfulness training quite easily and we would be safer as well.