Driving Test Morning: Ten Minutes of Sitting, and My Hands Still Shook

The appointment slip for my test was folded in four inside my shirt pocket, its corners gone soft from a night of me touching it. Six-forty. On the stove, the pot of rice porridge my wife had made was still steaming, the smell of fried shallots drifting all the way to the door, and I had not managed to ladle out a single bowl.

If you have had a morning like that — the morning of an exam, of a result, of a meeting where the whole room will look at you — you know how differently it runs from every other morning. The clock moves at its usual speed. Only you are half an hour ahead of it.

This is about the ten minutes I sat on the porch before leaving the house, where I got those ten minutes wrong, and why I still think they were worth sitting, even though my hands never stopped shaking.

Those ten minutes are not for making the shaking stop. I am saying it first because I sat down with exactly that hope myself, and it ruined the sitting from the first minute. They are not for walking into the test room in some steady frame of mind, either, or for guaranteeing anything about what happens behind the gate. They are just ten minutes in a spot where nobody is grading you.

Why does the shaking get worse the harder you push yourself to be calm?

At a quarter to seven I dragged the red plastic chair out onto the porch. A glass of warm water on the floor by its leg, my phone face down on the windowsill. Out in the street the motorbikes bunched up at the red light at the end of the alley and then broke apart when it went green. I laid both hands on my thighs and watched my right index finger twitch, steady as someone tapping a rhythm on a table.

"Calm down," I said to myself, silently. The finger kept twitching. "Calm down. It's nothing." It twitched harder. Then another voice came up inside my head, sounding more like me than the first one: "You are not calm, you know."

Thủy was standing in the doorway, wiping her hands on her apron.

— Eat a bit of porridge before you sit.

— In a minute.

— Your hands are shaking.

— No they're not.

I tucked both hands under my thighs and sat on them like a kid hiding a bad test paper.

The easy explanation is that I was shaking because I was afraid of failing. Half true. But if you stop there, the only remedy left is "just stop being afraid", a sentence nobody has ever heard and then stopped being afraid.

What wore me out that morning was not the shaking. It was the argument with the shaking. I treated it as a troublemaker, so I watched it, scolded it, hid it under my legs, and every time it ignored my orders I collected one more piece of evidence for being scared: see, if your hands are like this, what will happen once you are sitting in the car. The shaking was only a message saying that today matters. The one reading that message and panicking was me.

Seeing that did not stop my hands. But it changed the question worth asking, from "how do I make it stop" to "where is it, and do I need to fight it". The second one can be answered in ten minutes. The first cannot.

Ten minutes is a number so you do not have to decide; seven works too. The way to know you did it right is not that the shaking stops. It is something else: when time is up, you can say exactly which place was buzzing and which place was tight, instead of having only one vague sentence, that you are shaking.

The first time, most people find ten minutes long, and find the shaking louder than before they sat down. Some people feel steadier right away. I was in the first group. If you repeat it on other mornings with other things ahead, a test or a difficult appointment, a good number of people say the stretch of fighting with themselves gets shorter. Some people notice no difference at all, only that standing up from the chair gets a little easier. Both are normal.

On a morning with only three minutes, pick exactly one place in your body, look at it for three minutes, and go. One place only.

Where I slipped most was checking every few dozen seconds whether it had eased yet. Like someone with a thermometer in their mouth who keeps pulling it out to look. It is tempting because it resembles measuring progress, and whatever can be measured is easy to trust. But every check is another trip back into the fight, starting from zero. Keep one question instead and repeat it: how is this place right now? Not "has it eased yet".

The last fifteen minutes before the door: close the books, or revise once more?

"Just a little more revising, to be sure." I said that to myself seven times that morning, and every time it sounded reasonable.

At twenty to seven my phone buzzed. Tân, who was taking the test in the same round, called, out of breath.

— Do you remember the part about giving way at a roundabout? I have gone over it three times and it still feels like I know nothing.

— Same here.

— So what are you doing right now?

— Sitting.

— What do you get out of sitting?

Tân gave one short laugh and hung up. I watched the screen go dark and realized his question was the right one, and that I had no decent answer to it yet.

The easiest thing to get wrong is thinking that closing the books means letting go. Close them and then sit tormenting yourself that you should have checked that other section, and the zipped-up bag is heavier than it was open. Or close them and pick up your phone to scroll through other people's test stories, which sounds like relaxing and is really revising by another route. Both are tempting because your hands want a job, and the nearest job is always the phone or the bag. Give your hands a different one instead, small, and nothing to do with the exam.

Everyone explains this with one sentence: revise a bit more, to be sure. But by the last fifteen minutes, revising has almost stopped adding anything you know. It buys a feeling that you have everything in hand. A feeling bought that way runs out fast, so you buy again, and each time you open the notes you find one more place you are not sure about. The more you revise, the longer the list of unsure places grows, because your eyes are hunting for what you do not know and not for what you do. Those last fifteen minutes cannot add much to your head, but they can add a great deal of fear.

You know you did it right when the bag stays zipped until you stand up. You do not have to feel calm. The first time I opened the bag twice, the second time when the water in the cup had gone stone cold without my having taken a sip, and both times I read exactly one line and folded it away again. If that is you too, leave it there, close it once more, and skip the scolding. After a few sittings like this, some people say the itch arrives later; others still open the bag exactly as they did on day one, but close it faster.

On a day with five minutes left, do just two things: zip the bag and finish the cup of warm water before you go. If your mornings are always so rushed that even those two are hard, rushed every morning has a few ways of reclaiming loose minutes. And if you have exactly three seconds, three seconds of mindfulness in a busy day is enough.

If you tried it and your hands still shake and your head is still loud

This happens fairly often, so I will say it plainly.

The first common reason: sitting still makes whatever is loud sound louder. You sit for ten minutes and your mind runs through one exam question after another, clearer than when you were standing at the stove. That is not a sign you did it wrong. Sitting is simply like that. The way forward is to change the job instead of forcing the noise to stop: stand up, walk slowly around the house for two minutes, notice your feet on the tile, or go back to naming five things you can see. If the mind keeps running anyway, when the mind refuses to settle goes into it in more detail.

The second common reason: the wrong time. Some mornings the house is in a mess, the kids are not up, nobody has started breakfast, and you wedge these ten minutes into the middle of it. Ten minutes wedged in like that tend to turn into ten minutes of watching the clock. Do it the evening before, after dinner, and it still works, or keep only the three-minute version, sitting on a chair while you wait for your turn.

And some people simply do not suit sitting still before something big. They tend to need a walk, or sweeping the yard, something to do with the hands and feet before the head will settle. That is fine. Same idea, different way of doing it.

One more thing, said gently: if worry before things like this stays for weeks and starts to spill into eating and sleeping, talking to a friend you trust or to someone with professional training is a good thing to do. Not because you are weak, but because some things are not meant to be carried alone.

I will not tell you how the test went that day. It is not what this piece is about.

Just one detail to leave with you: when I stood up from the plastic chair, the appointment slip was still folded in four in my shirt pocket, still soft at the corners. The glass of water by the chair leg had gone cold. I drank it all.

This article was created with AI assistance.