Traffic in Cape Town is a fantastic barometer for mental health. There are moments when I glide through the streets in my barking seal of a car and there is a certain synchronicity at work. Lights turn green timeously and pedestrians amble with a nonchalant calmness that comes from knowing the atoms of the universe are arranged as they should be.Serendipity is what you call it if you are in the habit of sniffing incense and grinding your way through nut burgers in a grimy cafe overshadowed by Groote Schuur. At these moments, I am in the flow.But being in the flow is an ephemeral business. The edges are so blurred and slippery that it is easy to take your eye off the road for a split second, and there you are. Wide-eyed, vulnerable, besieged. Out of the flow.A homeless man flings himself at my bonnet as my fear and I crawl down Kloof Street in the gloaming. A manicured blonde in an X5 veers at me while messaging her divorce lawyer as she negotiates the aptly named Hospital Bend.Further towards the airport, a simian type with his hair on upside down is driving his million-rand knickerdropper big in my mirrors. A tin can quilted in repairs and smeared with tired, resigned faces is shuffling along in the fast lane in front of me and a Daddy's Delight with internal smog is alongside, ferrying some herbally diminished brain cells to a rad event in the Karoo.It feels like an eternity before I find a space to allow the frothing, crackling energy of the alpha male to roar, beat his chest and dissipate. To avoid the undertakers, I shimmy into the left lane.I understand that there will always be obstacles. What is harder to accept is having those obstacles hurtling towards me at 150km/h. That is enough to make my terror swerve around the Lower Main Road of my soul. It isn't driving a budget sedan either. Oh no. My terror harangues me in a V8 muscle car, bouncing off the kerbs as it negotiates the white lines and pedestrian crossings of my synapses.There will always be seething silverbacks with antlers and prancing horses on their bonnets. Marrying money doesn't seem to be going out of fashion , even though it is well past its sell-by date. There even seem to be more lemmings scurrying around the fractured nights of Long Street than ever before, all preparing to hug the seal like a lost relative.None of it is going anywhere and the flow is inside me, not something external. Acceptance is a wonderful, softening marinade for life's nut burgers. This epiphany leads me to attempt to take the flow with me on any journey.Just as this thought soothes me, something "other" pulls up alongside with electric hair and Iberian eyebrows, right foot twitching on the accelerator pedal. The Cadillac of fear is careening around the corner again. Some pimp in a fedora sits at the wheel, taunting me with a toothy grin. Terror just doesn't give a damn, does it?They say that nobody can drive you crazy if you don't give them the keys, but in Cape Town I get the feeling that all our keys are in a big bowl on the coffee table and it is just pot luck as to who is driving your sanity home tonight...