I was driving on the grounds of the transfer station (aka dump) a few weeks back, navigating from recycling to trash when I made a wrong turn. The woman who was driving towards me scowled, yelled at me from her car and honked her horn. I got flustered, remorseful, then really sad.
What is it, I thought, that has someone react with such venom when someone else is clearly under enormous stress? Isn’t that stress, or distress, the source of their erratic and disturbing behavior in the first place?
I remember the time I drove myself to the hospital while hemorrhaging, or when I was driving my husband back after cancer treatment and how he was writhing in pain while I sped home as quickly as possible. I can also think about all the times I have beeped at others not knowing really what they might have been dealing with in their car.
What has us just honk and beep and yell, totally forgetting that we cannot possibly imagine what might be driving (no pun intended) people to act in sometimes perilous ways?
Now I know that when we are using heavy machinery our reactivity is higher; we get startled and activate our most basic instincts. But in that dump, when we were going maybe three miles per hour, each of us finding our way between dumping stations, was that really at the source of that woman’s hostility? I actually don’t think so. I think that our sense of knowing each other, our sense that each person is doing their best at any given moment, that we are somehow in this together, is hidden from our view and missing in our hearts. This hole in our social fabric, this fraying of our knowing each other, of our sense of deep and real connection to all living being, permits us not to notice, or to even assume the best. This tear in the social fabric makes it ok to beep and yell and gesture in ways that only cause more harm.
So now I practice whenever I see someone behaving recklessly on the road: I ask myself, and I allow myself to wonder if their mother just died or their wife just left them or if they are driving to see their child in the hospital. I wonder what can’t I see, that if I could, it would open me back up to caring for their life, making it impossible for me to yell or honk or cause a greater tear…
Jen,
I strongly believe that we humans lack, as you say, connection-but not only to other humans. We, as a species, lack (or mis-perceive, as connection may be there/here just fine)connection to the earth, to the universe, to the divine…
Even our quantum physicists are telling us that we are part and parcel to everything. Your neighbor really is yourself. Huh?
As far as the driving-thing, I have a small bumper-sticker of “Namaste” on (the inside of) my windshield-visor, to remind me of my connection with the other driver. A person could put anything that works for them, though. It’s helped me.
LOVE,
Tatsy Guild
via Robin LeBlanc – Tatsy has a Mac and could not access the comments via hotmail …
Comment by Tatsy Guild — August 11, 2010 @ 6:49 am
What you’re describing seems to be a fear-anger transformation, something pretty common for us humans. Especially now, when we’re all pretty spun up much of the time. It seems to me that Americans (this is no so severe in some other places) feel an underlying sense of dread, as if something terrible is about to happen to us, or maybe has happened but we don’t know it. It’s infected our politics and our relationships, this dark cloud that hangs over us. We’re afraid to hope, to look to a brighter future, to forgive and go on. It’s cause for considerable concern.
Comment by Bob Schilling — August 19, 2010 @ 5:55 pm