To that Traffic Jam

It was a good day in office today. My boss was in a good mood throughout. She looked pretty too. The former is what we seek every day; the latter is a given in her case. On such evenings the team tends to walk out together, or close behind one another, laughing, smiling, bouncing on their feet, keys already in hand. Little did we know our smiles were about to be short lived. Within minutes we were all sitting in our cars, one after another in the same lane just outside office, tapping our fingers on the one possession we all reach for first, our phones.

Contrary to how it looks, getting stuck, in traffic or otherwise, is not always a bad thing. Moving inch by inch makes you notice things you would otherwise drive past. Think about the jams you have been part of. Do they happen only because the lanes are narrow and the vehicles too many? Both play a part, but mostly a jam happens because someone breaks a rule. Worse, once one person does it, others follow, until the road is a tangle of everyone's shortcuts. The real problem is that no one is willing to back off or make room. And so everyone stays stuck.

Such is life.

Think about it. The same thing happens in our everyday lives, even when we are nowhere near a steering wheel. We meet everything carrying our own judgments of right and wrong, our deep rooted beliefs, and we hold onto them all the time, unwilling to bend. We remember the line from a school textbook, that letting go is important if you want to start over. But no, we hold our grudges tightly and refuse to adjust. We neither back off ourselves nor let others move on. And so we stay stuck.

But every cloud has a silver lining.

We all reach home eventually, no matter how bad the jam. That evening it was a stranger who stepped out of his own car and began waving vehicles through, clearing the bottleneck by asking one lane to hold while he let the other pass, then switching. We have such anchors in our own lives too, sometimes a friend, a spouse, a mentor, a book, or a practice like Art of Living, Landmark Education, or Nichiren Daishonin's Buddhism.

Getting stuck is human. Not having an anchor in life is not.