Sharon Smith: A red light, short fuse

By Sharon Smith
Special to the Tri-City Times

I was suddenly furious. How did I go from being completely mellow to utterly angry in a two second interval?

I was driving toward a traffic light where I would turn left. With just one car in front of me I figured I would easily make it, especially since we had a green arrow. But wait. The car ahead of me stopped at the light. He sat there, looking down (no doubt at his phone) and I tapped the horn. Finally he looked up, just in time to see the light turn yellow, take off, and leave me sitting fuming at a red light.

I lost perhaps two minutes, but my brain reacted as though the guy had burglarized my house. This is a common human tendency, and not just with regard to traffic offenses. We are remarkably possessive of our time. We don’t like people taking our parking spaces, cutting in line, spending 10 minutes explaining something that could take 30 seconds.  

I’ve read that we get so angry when someone delays us in traffic because we blame them for wasting our time. We all know unconsciously that our time is limited, and when someone cuts us off or extends our drive for another few minutes, we overreact because they are cutting into our very lifespan.

But here’s the paradox: because our time is limited, shouldn’t we become less willing to spend it being furious? The guy at the light took a couple minutes from me. Then my anger took several more. In those few seconds I constructed a whole moral judgment about him. Maybe he wasn’t checking his phone, perhaps he was crying and looking for a tissue. Maybe he was having engine problems or had dropped something. Or, maybe he just was the inconsiderate jerk I thought he was, looking at his phone. But I don’t know. My judgment kicked in hard over a two minute delay. 

Eventually the light changed, I drove on, and the incident was forgotten by everyone except me. The man in front of me lost nothing at all. I lost two minutes to a red light and several more to anger. But hey, at least I got an idea for a newspaper column out of it.

I needed to remember this isn’t about traffic but that every person in the car ahead of us, in the checkout line or on the other end of the phone is carrying a story we cannot see. And the next time someone makes me wait two minutes, perhaps I’ll try to remember that before I give them another five.

— Sharon Smith is a pastor at St. Paul’s Lutheran Church and college instructor who writes about faith, life, and the occasional traffic-related moral crisis.