Who was that woman in the minivan?
The other day, the dogs and I were out for a jog around Humboldt Park in Bay View. It was an absolutely gorgeous spring morning; the temperature was around 58 and the sunshine was 100%. The breeze was cool but invigorating.
As we jogged along, our recurring daydreams (mine of a spa day and theirs of chasing the cats around the house) were interrupted by a near miss on the street nearby. We heard a horn and saw the driver’s middle finger fly up toward the two men who she’d almost picked off while they were crossing the street.
I wonder how she explained the situation to the person she was talking to on her cell phone. Or what was going through her children’s heads as one of them watched from the passenger seat and the other looked on from his car seat in the back.
Personally, I thought, “Holy crap, that woman needs a day off.” Well, actually, first I wondered how she got up to what must have been 35 miles per hour when she’d just come from a stop sign. And then I wondered how she got to that place. The one where anger was driving her.
What was it about her morning/day/week/life that made her accelerate so quickly? What was it that made those men invisible to her? And what on earth made her blame them that she was going to be late for a job she probably doesn’t even like in the first place?
I’m only wondering because I’ve been there. (Haven’t we all?) I’d totally be lying if I said I’ve never felt street/highway/road rage – or even just plain frustration that someone was in my way, not moving fast enough or not doing it right (i.e. my way.)
Let me put it this way: the horn on my car works. And so does my birdie finger, mumbling under my breath and maybe some name calling – preferably passive aggressively. And I’m someone who actually enjoys my life, my job and even all my “have-tos.”
All of this has me wondering which is cause and which is effect – do some people have less stress because they love their lives? Or do they love their lives because they have less stress? For all I know, the woman driving the red van does love her life and doesn’t have a problem with stress or rage or discontentedness at all. Maybe she nearly had an honest-to-goodness accident. (In her defense, the guys did seem to come out of nowhere.)
Perhaps the harried woman behind the wheel wasn’t a raged creature of darkness at all. Maybe she was put there, right at that moment, to remind me (so that I could remind you) to move more deliberately among life’s chaos – and to always yield to others, even when they’re not in the crosswalk.
I think the act of driving introduces an enormous range of stresses that we just can’t handle all the time. Talk about sensory overload, every second we’re driving requires constant attention to the road ahead, behind and to the sides. When we lapse, we’re often shocked back into reality by a near-miss like you wrote about. That recognition of what could have been isn’t always accepted in a clear-headed way.
People in Milwaukee and most other places can barely keep it all together as it is, let alone when they’re trying to beat stoplights in a misguided rush to shave a few seconds off their travel time. Sometimes even that extra bit o’ stress is enough to push them over their limit.