A Simple Drive To Work
I’m driving to work and like always, I’m perfectly on time. Providing that everything moves smoothly, I will pull up to work with a comfortable 3 minutes before the hour, enough for me to put my keys away and put on my smile.
Then a mother changes lanes suddenly, cutting me off. She slows her roll to an insufferable 40km/hour and I’m boxed in on all sides. With no choice other than to slow down with her, I start to curse her under my breath as my blood pressure rises.
Up ahead, I see a lane closure for construction. As a shuffle my bumper up a few inches a minute, I glare at the equally-as-grumpy construction worker waving us through.
I am moving for no more than a minute before coming to a sudden stop behind tourist plates that are clearly unsure of where they need to go through this intersection. A big SUV backend sits ever so slightly too centered to the intersection that I can’t whip my way around them and get caught at a painfully long red light.
By now, my light steam has erupted into full-blown curse words and aggressive horn honking.
“Doesn’t anyone know how to drive anymore!?”, I utter with disgust.
“Just MOVE it, buddy!”
The rest of my commute looks like something from a James Bond movie as I lurch and whip my car along the same well-traveled route until I screech into the last available parking spot with seconds to spare. I made it, but just barely.
My adrenaline is pulsing, I’m flustered, hot, and irritated. It takes me over half a session with my first client to calm down enough to fully focus on them; not exactly the picture of professionalism I pride myself on.
“All this”, I think, “because of avoidable traffic?”
I could have left earlier.
I should have taken a different route; I knew there was still construction.
Those damn tourists!
Why can’t people just drive properly?
All these thoughts run through my head well past the 15-minutes it took for me to get to work.
That’s when it hits me.
This is the type of chronic stress that is so detrimental to our health, physically and mentally. This type of thinking is exhausting, pointless, unproductive, and downright harmful.
These thoughts are literally a waste of my brain power, my energy, and if I’m honest, they are a total waste of time — of life!
In pausing to recognize this, I feel foolish and almost fall into the trap of chastising myself again before observing: that’s exactly the pattern of thinking that I am trying to interrupt.
Starting again, this time slower, I try to watch for opportunities to self-correct. I give myself permission to explore a few paths of thought before deciding I need to rewind and start again.
I do my best not to judge as I acknowledge that I am still learning and failure is part of the growth process.
I find myself repeatedly projecting my problems on other people — the mother who cut me off; the construction worker who closed the lane; the tourist who couldn’t figure out where they were going before the light changed — if these people had just cleared out my way, I never would have had this problem!
“Yes, yes.” My mind lights up. “I left early enough provided that these people weren’t on the road today!”
Then I catch it, my ego, defending itself as if anyone else on this earth gave a damn.
As if these people were truly any different from me on any given day, in different circumstances somewhere in this vast realm of possibilities.
Suddenly it all just drops for me. The pettiness of it becomes separate somehow as if I am observing it from far away.
I understand how I can dip my toes, my fingers, sometimes even my whole head in the pools of my ego — but I no longer want to be submerged in it. It takes me a lot of floundering around before I realize what I had been swimming in for so long. And longer still to realize that this whole time I was struggling, I merely had but to stand up and step out.
Even in recanting this story, it takes a lot to lift my feet out of self-judgment and offer myself the same compassion that I hope those people might give to me, were I able to get the opportunity to redo that drive again.
It makes me pause and realize that no matter how many times I’ve done that drive to work and no matter how many more times I have yet to do it, that drive the way it happened that late February Tuesday morning, will never occur quite as it did then. And there’s something purely magical about that which sure does make it hard to be caught up in my ego as the world passes me by.
I drove to work three more times that week and it was smooth sailing all the way through. So smooth in fact, that it was almost forgettable. Isn’t it a wonder the things that make you pause and pay attention? That’s something worth reflecting on if you ask me.
