Slowing Down for Yellow

A few months ago, I diagnosed myself with road rage. There’s just something about driving streets loaded with blaring horns, aggressive tour busses and agitated people shouting to themselves (some on hands-free devices, some equally afflicted with driving tempers). But they weren’t the problem. It was me.

There was one afternoon while edging out a cab to get into the turning lane on K Street that I realized I had crossed more than a painted line. An angry car horn screamed behind me, and I threw my hands in the air, aggravated that he couldn’t tell what kind of hurry I was in. A meeting had run long, and I was late to day care. The cabbie was after a fare waiting at the corner.

That slice of road became a battle of entitlement, while the cars stacking up behind us started honking, wondering what kind of idiots up ahead couldn’t work out how to merge.

As I turned around in a huff to glare at the cab driver, I realized I’d gone round the bend. It wasn’t as though I’d be giving up custody to the day care if I was a few minutes late. They probably wouldn’t notice if I got there minutes after pick-up time anyway. In the mix of horns and swearing in a number of languages I didn’t understand, I caught onto something: my timetables are no one else’s priority, so long as I stayed out of their way. My rush was mad, and my own.

I turned the wheel and let the cab through. He flung a gesture out the window with which I am quite familiar, and serenely, I watched him pass. The light ahead turned yellow, and instead of darting through as I normally would, I just let it go and pulled to a stop.

What finally slowed me down on the road and in life has been my son (an irony, since so often, I'm scuttling off to fetch him). Like a yellow appliqué that’s been stuck to my brain, “Baby on Board” has nudged me toward caution, slowing down. Cruising at break-neck speed might eventually lead me to do just that sort of bodily damage. Minutes have become more precious, more relevant. I took a deep breath at that red light, and told myself, better late than never.

A storm this weekend knocked out power to an estimated quarter million people in the D.C. metropolitan area. Trees were felled by tornado-like winds. Wires drooped, dead, from power lines. And cars stacked up on main thoroughfares as people had to negotiate four-way stops without the assistance of stoplights. It was drivers’ anarchy. With my recently commitment to slowing down and driving sensibly, I couldn’t quite shake the feeling that in this roadway Lord of the Flies, I was Piggy, and my time was nigh.

What I found was, despite the fact that so many of our lives had been altered dramatically with candle-lit homes, no air conditioning, and food cooked over grill fires our road habits were, as ever, defined by a fever pitch impulse move. As I dawdled and forced myself to take my time at many intersections this week, I recognized that my old habits were as much an element of my environment as a personal inclination. The roads were overflowing with the attitude me first as we each battled for our turn. Whatever its cause, that drumbeat that makes us speed, check work email into the night, hoarding a whole docket of twittering, beeping devices to keep us connected—all that spells GO and NOW.

I still catch myself wanting to shoot past slightly slower drivers or blast through intersections when green goes to yellow. Just this morning, when power returned, I caught myself with white knuckles shuttling through as yellow flipped to red.

But in the back of my mind, there’s now a quieter voice, telling me that it’s not a big deal if I’m late; that I have plenty of time and should just start leaving the house earlier. There’s a new part of me that no longer thrills at making “good time” while sweating each fraction of a second on the road. Good time is that which I can have when the car is parked, when I stop moving. Instead of edging to the front of the line, perhaps a new way of putting me first (that dictum of all God-fearing, Oprah-watching, American women) really is just sparing my sanity and slowing down.