Stuck in traffic-- Mental traffic.

A recent post I saw on Facebook went thus:  “You are not stuck in traffic—you are traffic.”

There’s not a single one of us who has not experienced the phenomenon of being ‘stuck in traffic’. But how many times do we realize that we are, in fact, part of the traffic that seems to make our lives miserable? This simple statement of fact puts our place in the world into perspective. We tend to view the world from a “spotlight” angle, making ourselves the focus and centre of the universe. To each of the billions and billions of Homo sapiens roaming the earth, the spotlight is always on them. Hence the appropriateness of the traffic example—every person honking away in that jam is ‘stuck in traffic’ and every other person is the cause of the hold-up.

That’s a microcosmic representation of the entire story of our lives—there’s always something bad ‘happening to us’; pumping up our frustration levels and making us desperate for ways to get out of the situation. But when we zoom out and see the larger picture, we get an aerial view of the truth: we are an integral part of the problem. It’s not just ‘happening to us’, we are part of the reason it’s happening at all. The Facebook post was, on the face of it, a pro-environment one, and had a very simple solution to being stuck in traffic: get a bike, break free!  Applied to other facets of our life, it simply means: can we stop banging our head against the problem hoping for it to break down, and look for a way around it instead?  Can we, for once, imagine that it’s not just happening ‘to us’; it’s happening ‘because of us’—so maybe if we could change the way WE think, or the way WE behave, we might be able to change entirely what we’re going through?

Zooming out to get an aerial view shows you things you never saw before: the simple truth that what’s happening to you is happening to everyone else, too. That’s the part which is hardest to accept: every incident in your life is not about you. People with a high need for achievement—the winners and the go-getters—find this the bitterest pill to swallow. Sometimes when we fail, or even when we miss the top spot (for some people, second is worse than last!), the depression is overwhelming. But just for once, we could step back and see the larger picture. Maybe this wasn’t our moment of triumph at all. Maybe, in the vast, complex scheme of the cosmos, this was another person’s moment of truth. It wasn’t something bad happening to us; it was something good that just happened to someone else.  Of course, that doesn’t mean we must stop searching for our own moment of glory; it just means being able to accept and appreciate when that moment belongs to another.

Each one of us is the hero/heroine of his/her own life’s story. And that’s the way it ought to be too. (How could you go around playing a supporting role in your own story? Definitely not acceptable.) But sometimes, without knowing it, we become a part of someone else’s life story, and at that point we are no longer the leading man or lady. Playing a supporting role can be frustrating to our spotlight sense of existence. But that’s the secret to living life gracefully: knowing which moment is yours, and which is just yours to applaud.