Road Intersection Lesson #2

Have you ever thought you’d squeezed every morsel of learning out of some lesson, only to have it say, wait! there’s more!

My Road Rage story was like that. I dubbed the location where I learned to reduce my road rage, mindfulness intersection. After blogging about it I thought, ok, that intersection is dry; I’ve learned all there is.

But life continued. And I realized so much depends on perspective. When I first wrote about taming my road rage, I wrote about it from my perspective: the one pissed off that another car cut in front of me.

My second lesson had me being the cutter.

Not that I viewed what I was doing as cutting. Based on the traffic flow, stop light, and road layout, merging into moving traffic made perfect sense. Yes, I was turning right on a red light, but there was plenty of space for me to pull out. Plus, my lane had a separate turn lane for going right; it invited me to merge into the flowing traffic.

And yet, this time I saw the intersection with fresh eyes. I realized it was nearly identical to my mindfulness intersection, only in this version, I was the one being the a-hole and pulling out from a red-lighted stop position into moving traffic; I was the one cutting in front of other cars.

I was doing the exact same thing that had ticked me off when it was “being done to” me.  I saw myself as the other.

No one raised a finger or shouted at me. But in a split second, I saw this familiar scene from an entirely new vantage point. I started laughing, and thought, “wow, this time I’m the f’ing jerk in this story.”

 

Postscript: There will be at least a third post about another lesson I’ve learned from my mindfulness intersection. Every time I think I’ve learned all there is from that spot, some new perspective is presented. So, I’ve stopped assuming any lesson is the last lesson. Because, as I’m learning, there are a multitude of perspectives out there.

Photo source: Alexas_Fotos on Pixabay

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