Unless I leave for work before 6:15am, it's going to take at least 30 minutes to get to work, and I'm going to be caught in stop and go traffic. It's inevitable. Now that I leave my cube at the end of the day and head downstairs to the gym for an hour, I'm not leaving work until 4:45 or later, it's going to take at least 45 minutes to get home, and I'm going to be caught in stop and go traffic. It's inevitable. Not a day goes by, not a day, that I don't see a car buzzing down the shoulder, a motorcycle tip-toeing the center lane lines, someone running a red light, someone dragging ass in the left lane because they're on the phone, someone too oblivious to their surroundings that they don't have their lights on even though the sun has been gone for a half hour, or some other bad excuse for driving. I center this around driving because I do it for between 90 and 120 minutes a day and it's the most frequent test of my patience.
Typically I am a laid back person, so it's easy to be 'slow to judge.' If you're patient, if you like to get all the information before you react, if you don't let things stress you out, etc, then the small stuff doesn't bother you as much, and it's easier to reserve pegging someone as evil. There are so many situations throughout my day where I never have to stop and think before making a hasty decision on someone. Generally, at work, or at the store, or at the bars, things pretty much go with the flow and I don't bat an eye.
But driving as much as I do, encountering hundreds of drivers a day, my sample size is staggering.
Today was no different than what I've just described. Sitting on the Edens, approaching Peterson, crawling in the right lane, and sure enough two cars pull out over the solid white line and zip down the ample shoulder space. The first car coasts onto the off ramp heading west while the second car throws their turn signal on and eases back into traffic, passing a dozen cars in the process. The result of this story is not the purpose of telling it. When I saw both vehicles jerk out of their lane, 'Quick to Judge' popped in my head. Given my level of frustration on this cold, overcast morning, I thought they both deserved to be penalized. Right after thinking that, though, I thought about my own writing. I thought about my words, giving people the benefit of the doubt. Maybe that second car thought it had to get off, then realized they were one exit too soon. Whatever the excuse could have been, it didn't make me dislike that driver any less. But just the awareness to stop and think for a second made me happy.
See, I make a lot of proclamations when I write. I offer advice, I try to provide the most logical, thought out response to an array of situations, and the theory is whatever you decide, whether it be to follow my words to find your own path, that you set some guidelines and you follow them. Well I just said that despite my own 'rule' to give people the benefit of the doubt, both drivers this morning pissed me off. But I was sated at the fact that I could back away from the situation and see what was happening before making my decision. In reality, I did exactly what I set out to do, which was delay my judgment. I reacted, thought about it, then didn't change my reaction. But thinking back over all the different tid bits of 'advice' that I've doled out in the last 22 months, there are countless times when I ignore my own words. And even though I've written about heeding my own advice, I think there is something to be said about acknowledging the situation, but choosing against it.
You can't cookie cutter every moment into something you've already broken down. You have to be able to play it by ear, to an extent. The rules you end up writing for your own life shouldn't be written in permanent marker. If there's no room for wiggle, there's no room for error, and that's an impossible way to live.
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