Lanes

As an adult, I have been working for about 23 years. With an average commute of 50 minutes, I have spent over 440 full 24-hour days driving. Not counting road trips!

With that much time behind the wheel, I’ve seen some wild stuff. Things like vacuum cleaners, mattresses, and a bucket of baseballs and bats have fallen out of trucks. I’ve seen a variety of accidents. Some cars surprised me they ran, let alone being on the highway. I regularly see a recurring chain of events that starts with an aggressive lane change.

It is impossible to know the driver’s intention, but some seem hostile, and others are just careless. Someone in the far right lane slides into the center lane. They get in front of someone who isn’t pleased with this. The cut-off move triggers the middle lane driver to shift harshly into the left lane, which cuts off a third, previously uninvolved, driver.

The middle lane driver gets irritated that someone cut into their lane, so they do the exact thing to someone else. I am empathetic to this frustration. I’ve been there. When I am not involved, it makes me laugh every time. “I do not like what you did to me, so I will do it to this stranger over here.”

Driving is high stakes. Lives are at risk. Sometimes, the stakes feel like they include winning. It is as if it were a race, and each position we lose moves me further from first place.

Very few things in life really have winners and losers. A zero-sum game, where the winner’s gain comes from their opponent’s loss, is uncommon outside of actual games.

I sometimes take my frustration from one experience and channel it into an unrelated interaction. Which might cause someone else to continue on the chain reaction. It is all caused by thinking I am losing a game that isn’t even being played.

Will I take a beat after being frustrated and let it stop with me? Can I appreciate that most interactions don’t have winners and losers? Am I convincing myself I am in a game that doesn’t exist?

Be curious, be kind, be whole, do good things.