What I Learned About Life While Sitting in Traffic - guest post by Carol Fleming

Carol Fleming

I was inching along in bumper-to-bumper traffic on a 5-lane city street, 2 lanes in each direction plus a center turn lane. It was almost, but not quite, complete gridlock. The traffic light was a couple blocks before me, and traffic stretched out blocks behind me. I saw a guy trying to ease into the traffic lane from a parking lot, and decided to stop to create space for him to merge. A lady in the lane next to me saw what I was doing and she stopped as well, leaving room for him to not only merge, but cross both lanes of traffic to get into the center turn lane if that’s what he wanted.

But he didn’t look up. He was staring down at something, maybe a phone, and he would occasionally glance up to look to see if the traffic light was green, but he never looked right in front of him to see the space that had been created for him. We waited and waited, but he never looked at where he wanted to go. Eventually, as traffic picked up a bit, I looked over at the lady in the lane next to me, we both smiled and shrugged our shoulders, and started driving.  His space was gone.

I couldn’t get this guy out of my mind. I kept thinking that even though what he wanted was right in front of him, he didn’t expect it to happen. He didn’t look for it and he missed it, entirely.

I wondered if that’s happened to me, if there was a time when I really didn’t believe that I’d get what I wanted so I didn’t notice when it showed up.

I told this to several friends, and everyone had similar traffic stories of their own. One friend said that after allowing space for someone who didn’t look up, traffic started moving and she moved with it. Her guy finally looked up and starting honking his horn and making rude gestures at her. She asked m, “Was it my responsibility to honk my horn at him to alert him to that space? Wasn’t his responsibility to pay attention?”

This felt like one of those profound but practical life lessons we sometimes get. If I want something to happen, believe that it will come, keep watch out for it. Look for it. Look in all directions. If I think it will come from one certain place, look all around anyway. Don’t wait for others to show me what’s showed up. Look for myself.

A couple weeks after all this happened, once again I found myself in slow-moving traffic and a guy ahead was trying to merge into the lane from a parking lot. I decided when I got up to him, I’d stop to create a space. When I got to him, though, he had become discouraged and was backing up, presumably to find another way out of the parking lot.

I added to my earlier practical life lessons, another lesson: Don’t give up too soon.

Contact Carol at carol@LivingNJoy.com and Antonia at antoniasseniormoments@hotmail.com

Catastrophe or Opportunity? - Guest Blog by Carol Fleming

          We each decide which experiences are catastrophes and which are opportunities. We each decide if every day is a treasure or something to endure. It’s our reality—we get to choose.

           I met a person recently who made the decision to turn a horrifying experience into an opportunity for growth. With his permission, I share his story here.

           He looks like Buddha in quiet repose … serene, calm, quiet, gentle. Nothing ruffles him, but he wasn’t always like this. His outlook on life changed completely after an accident almost claimed his life.

           He works as a commercial fisherman. Several years ago, he was working in the Bering Sea on a small fishing boat with a four-man crew. The boat was a “catcher” boat, one that caught fish in a net and turned the catch over to a processing boat. On this particular day, his boat was towing a net filled with several ton of fish. The boat started to turn but did so too slowly, and the heavy net sank toward the bottom. The engines tried to pull the boat forward but the net became an anchor, and the boat flipped over in seconds.

           It happened so quickly, the men didn’t have time to grab emergency gear. A raft was set to deploy automatically if the boat overturned, but three of the men found themselves trapped underneath the boat, in a pocket of air.

           After a frantic few moments, the men realized that to survive this, they had to leave the safety of the air pocket and swim down, underwater, to get out from under the boat. They were terrified, but they had to do it to survive.

           He has no idea how long he was in the water—it could have been one minute or 30 minutes. Thankfully, all three men made it to the raft and were rescued by another nearby boat. The three men lived, but the fourth man, the captain, did not survive.

           He returned home a changed man. He looked around his hometown and saw people filling their days with anger and strife, men who were sitting on the same bar stools they’d been sitting on when he left—a way of life he no longer wanted.

           His close encounter with death, his fight to survive, put everything into perspective. He had learned life can change in an instant. The things people do or say or how they act that once would have bothered him no longer mattered. Today, he values people, relationships, love. His advice? If it doesn’t bring happiness, it doesn’t matter … it’s not worth your time. His catastrophe gave him the ability to realize what really mattered to him and to release what wasn’t important.

           Just like him, we each get to decide what really matters to us, what we want to invite into our lives. Let’s not wait for a life-changing catastrophe to realize what we really love and want to embrace in our life. Let’s do it now.

You may reach Carol at Aiming4Joy@gmail.com
You may contact Antonia at antoniasseniormoments@hotmail.com or
     Antonia's Senior Moments on Facebook