Road Rage- What's the point?
So I was driving home from school today in a relatively good mood. I had my music blaring, my mind wandering, and I'm surrounded by beautiful mountain scenery with the sun shining bright. A perfect day for a drive!
I'm not going to lie...LA traffic sucks! If I were to say anything negative about living here, it'd be the traffic. As I'm approaching the one lane freeway change to get to my house, mind you I've been sitting in my car waiting for my turn to get on that freeway, a car out of nowhere cuts me off. Not just cuts me off, but literally to the point where I had to lay down my horn and slam on my breaks because I thought he was going to hit me.
My first reaction: I was pissed! My heart was pounding, I was calling him names, and I really wanted to tail him until he acknowledged me and what he did. I wanted this person that I didn't even know, suffer for the 5 second long incident that nobody got hurt from.
At that moment, I caught myself. I took a deep breath and thought, "I wasn't hurt.My car wasn't touched. It's still beautiful in sunny and I am still on my way home. Why would I let a complete stranger, who obviously has patience issues, or is having a bad day, or plainly just made a mistake, ruin my good mood?" If we would've collided, that would've been a whole other story, but we didn't. I'm never going to see this person again…why waste the energy?
posted by Jamie @ 4:38 PM
4 comments
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4 Comments:
Ditto! Why waste the energy? Now if only those cutting us off could feel the same way about having to get ahead all the time :-)
agreed. patience is one of the hardest personal challenges for me....(that's why i got the chinese symbol of it tattoed on me, unfortunately it's on my back so it doesn't serve as the reminder I intended). i am so guilty of wanting to make strange and bad drivers acknowledge their action but I find that in the end even if I get in a good honk and an evil glare, I still don't get the satisfaction I was after :)
Let me say I read it somehere that patience is a virtue that builds character. And when all else fails, it is character that will carry one over the hump - that is hopefully whatever you are humping.
I had to remind myself repeatedly that death sentence for a traffic infraction is too draconian. So I would tell myself that the driver was simply being stupid.This starts a conversation with myself where I answer that the most effective cure for stupidity is death- so appropriately, dead stupid people will not propagate and there will be less people in the world to aggravate me. This is where I realize I do not act so wisely everytime all the time myself............
You can see I am lost again.
Musing about patience - I would tell my daughter that patience could very well be a simple case of time management where she does not have to do anything for a while. And therein lies the problem, because one had to wait. A person would see doing nothing as an activity of waiting and waiting for nothing will make anybody impatient. This is where patience as a virtue comes in ..... etc.etc. - This is where I lose you, I guess.
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