Perspective

So I'm going from one place to another place, like you do (as @erikjfisher would put it). I had it planned out-there was time enough to get where I needed to go, but not a lot of extra time. That's not usually the way I roll, but that was the way it lined up. So I'm going, and the ONLY way to get across your friend and mine, the Delaware River, the aptly named Burlington-Bristol Bridge, is closed.

F&%k.

So we turn around, and think for a minute, and develop an alternate route. We use it, and get where we're going, no harm, no foul, about 20 minutes late, which turned out not to matter. Another anodyne frustration, right?

So I get home, and I see this , which apparently happened 15 minutes before I came along. There was a two car collision, causing two people to be sent to the hospital.

There's a famous David Foster Wallace speech where he talks about how we tend to view other people as extras in the movies of our lives.

"Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don't make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I'm going to be pissed and miserable every time I have to food-shop, because my natural default-setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me, about my hungriness and my fatigue and my desire to just get home, and it's going to seem, for all the world, like everybody else is just in my way, and who are all these people in my way?"


Those people are human, just like you and I, and have needs, and wants, and frustrations, just like you and I do. It's easy to forget that. 


I hope the people who so grievously inconvenienced me today are OK.