learn · 2026-10-28 · 3 min read
The silent car ride that taught me what mettā feels like
After twenty days at a retreat centre in France (ten serving in the kitchen, then ten more sitting as a student) I left with a friend from the course. Leo lived in the east of the country, near the Swiss border, and neither of us had money for a train. So we hitchhiked.
Leo had done this before. On the roadside, holding a piece of cardboard with a town written on it, he gave me the only instruction I got:
When you're standing there with your thumb up, radiate mettā.
Mettā is loving-kindness, the practice of wishing well. And honestly, I know how I took it at the time, because I suspect most people take it the same way: as a slightly embarrassing piece of magical thinking. Stand there beaming good vibes at strangers in cars and one of them will pull over. It's the sort of thing you say yes to when you need a lift and your friend is confident.
It did work, in the trivial sense that we got lifts. But that isn't the story.
Somewhere along the route an elderly British couple stopped for us, two grey-haired travellers on some long trip of their own. We got in, said thank you, sorted our bags out.
And then, from the front seat:
"Everything all right, lads?"
"Yes, of course."
"Good. Then let's just drive quietly and enjoy it."
That was the entire conversation. I've remembered it for more than a decade.
Understand what normally happens when strangers pick up two young hitchhikers. There's the interview. Where are you from, where are you going, what do you do, how long have you been travelling, and, depending on the driver, a view about young people today, a story they've told before, or a series of questions with a correct answer.
None of that is unkind. It's the ordinary social contract: I'm doing you a favour, so you entertain me, and we fill the silence because silence between strangers is felt as a debt.
What those two did was cancel the contract. They checked that we were all right, which is the part that matters, and then removed every other obligation from the car. No performance required. Nothing owed. Just two more people going the same way for a while.
And I remember exactly what happened in my body: Leo and I both let go of something, and then we were simply tearing along a sunlit road in summer, and it was one of the best hours of that entire year.
I had thought mettā was an emission. Something you generate inside yourself, a warm feeling you work up and then aim outward, and the better you are at it the more of it comes off you.
What that car taught me is that most of it is subtraction.
Those two didn't radiate anything at us. They withheld: the questions, the advice, the conversational tax, the need to be found interesting. And out of that withholding came the most comfortable hour I had spent with strangers in years.
Which reframed the roadside instruction completely. Radiating mettā while holding a cardboard sign isn't about broadcasting good wishes at passing windscreens. It's about what you're not doing while you stand there: not resenting the cars that pass, not calculating, not performing cheerfulness to earn a lift, not making every driver into a transaction that either did or did not go your way. Stand there for two hours without accumulating a grievance and something in your face is genuinely different by the time the car stops.
The practice underneath it is the same one the sittings train, the breath ones and the devotional ones in Whispers of God alike. A sensation arises and you don't build on top of it. A person is in front of you and you don't immediately put your material on them.
You can test it, and not on a roadside: you probably have no plans to hitchhike across France. Somewhere duller.
The next time you're with someone and there's a silence, don't fill it. Notice the pull to fill it, which will be strong and will feel like politeness, and don't obey it. Check they're all right. Then let the quiet be the thing you're offering, rather than the thing you're apologising for.
Most people have never been given that. It costs nothing, it requires no warm feeling you have to manufacture first, and, in my experience, it's remembered much longer than whatever you'd have said.
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