Road Rage

Do you want to see men at their most raw, angry moments? Then take a drive through rush-hour traffic. Sure, it might exist elsewhere, but nowhere is it so convinient. At such times, people morph into impersonal vehicles... and tempers can flare.

It's easy to get frustrated - you just want to get home at the end of a long day, and there's SO MANY people in your way. I've gotten frustrated any number of times, so I know how it feels. But such anger is usually full of hypocristy and unrighteous indignation, so I have been working for some self control on such drives.

I'm gald, too, because it gave me an interesting perspective when an erratically driving woman who had been in front of me for a few miles made sure to stick her arm as far as she could out the window to flip me the bird as she was slowing down to exit the freeway, with her face contorted by what looked like pure fury as she screamed somethign inaudible at me from a couple lanes away.

For the life of me, I don't know what I did to make her so angry at me. My best guess is that I either was following her too close for her comfort on the freeway, or that I moved to the right to try and speed up at the same time that she intended to.

Being able to see it from the outside, but in a frame of mind where I wasn't affected by it gave me a chance to see just what it looks like when people get furious at each other on the road, and often over the most minor inconviniences to us. It was sobering, because the expression she wore on her face I've worn in my heart plenty of times as I'm driving.

So I asked for forgiveness for my own anger when I'm driving, I prayed for the woman that she was able to find release for her anger so that it wouldn't ruin her day, and asked that I might become more considerate when driving, so that if there was anything I had done to earn such a response that I would not do so again.