I was biking home the other night and I passed a woman on her bike and as I passed I could hear shouting coming from up the street, and as I continued on it became clear that the shouting was directed at this young woman. As the words of the shouting became understandable, I was taken aback at the vitriol. They were offensive and strong words. They were shocking. They were the kind of words that someone will use when they want to belittle, bully and humiliate a woman.
Maybe I should just use the words. I think in some ways, by not using the words I give them more power as you imagine what they might be, but for now I don’t feel like using them here.
It made me angry. As I biked by the guy who was shouting – he was leaning out the window of his pick-up truck stopped in the middle of a residential intersection, half-way through a left turn, I wanted to shoot off my own mouth back at him, but I held my tongue. I couldn’t think of a single thing to say that would help the situation. There must be something to say, just to get it out there that whatever happened to make him angry, it’s not okay to speak that way to somebody.
Then last Friday I was picking up my son and we were waiting at an intersection to cross the street. In front of us there was a car waiting to turn right, and as the driver waited for a pedestrian to cross the street in front of her, the car behind her began to honk his horn impatiently. He must have done it three times. It was clear to us standing on the corner that she didn’t have a space to turn right safely. There was a woman pushing a stroller across the street in front of her.
Finally her space came just as the light was turning yellow and she turned, leaving the guy who was honking stuck at the light – exactly the scenario he’d been hoping to avoid. I guess honking hadn’t done the trick for him. As we crossed the street in the midst of all the other pedestrians I thought of saying something to this man as well, but two other men beat me to it. One of them leaned over – the man’s car window was open – called the man a prick and told him that a woman with a stroller had been crossing. The other guy just called him a prick.
It didn’t seem particularly helpful. It may have given the man pause to think about honking his horn the next time. I’m sure it also only added to whatever emotion the man was feeling that had inspired him to honk his horn in the first place. If he’d been impatient and grumpy before, he was almost certainly impatient and grumpy now.
I’ve been thinking lately about that sweet solid ground and how it seems that there are a lot of people who aren’t standing in that place. They might not describe their search in the same way, but they’re not happy. They’re frustrated. A lot of people have something like a chip on their shoulder for some reason or another. I can’t know if those two people fall into that category, but I suspect they do, or did. I feel like people don’t behave that way if everything is right inside, but then again, is everything right inside with anyone?
Some people are just rude – when something irritating or frustrating happens, it can make even the most content and fulfilled person feel anger, and if anger makes us want to lash out we need to learn to contain that. If we don’t learn to contain it, we lash out. In many ways being rude is a very natural reaction. The desire to hurt or to tear down can rise up in just about anyone.
Either way, it got me thinking about how our separate searches for solid ground, or joy, or success or happiness or however we think of it or talk about it, do not take place in bubbles. Our searches overlap and they affect the people we come into contact with. When we are lost and angry, we are rarely the only people to feel the negative effects of this state of being. It touches those around us.
When things cross our path and trip us up or get in our way, the way that we react and respond to these interruptions can
It occurs to me that when I think about my own search – my own joy – my own life, I think I do myself a disservice and miss a whole big piece of the puzzle when I think of my search as being solely my own. There’s a really really big context in which we all pursue our dreams and try to find that sweet spot and when we ignore that context we can blunder our way into the kind of selfishness that really hurts people. Sometimes it ends up just being rudeness, but sometimes it can do so much more.
But at the same time we can’t base our search on other people’s sweet spots – at least not when it comes at the expense of finding our own. I suspect that there is some kind of strange and wonderful law of nature where hitting other people’s sweet spots ends up satisfying our own, but I think there are also a lot of ways that setting out to please other people leaves us feeling empty. I think that there is also an alarming natural law where working too much for other people at the expense of our own sweet spots leaves us resenting people and maybe even wanting to hurt them, or at least to shout at them or to honk at them
There’s a balance out there, but somehow our individual searches for peace and for happiness are linked – they overlap and they influence and shape each other. It’s complicated, which makes it worth writing about – and pursuing.
