Reflections On Sounding My Car Horn

I feel like explaining that what I was upset with myself about, when I wrote Easier Said Than Done, was having lengthily sounded my car horn at someone who pulled out of a driveway to make a left turn, while I was coming straight at their driver’s side at 40 mph.  While, on one hand, it’s somewhat laughable to be upset with myself for that, on the other hand, I didn’t react with the level of compassion that I could have.  There was a lot of traffic, and it’s unlikely they would have gotten any more space to pull out inbetween cars than there was in front of me, anytime in the next hour.  I made what was already a stressful situation for that person, worse.  It’s likely that the other driver carried negative emotions – such as anger, frustration, or embarrassment, or all three – from that event for at least some period of time afterwards, that may have affected their actions toward other drivers or people at their destination.  I have been and will be again in that person’s situation myself, and I would not like to have someone blow their horn at me.  While it may seem like such a small thing to still be analyzing four days later, these small things are what add up to our collective experiences of this life. 

We are all connected.  We all create each other’s world, by our choices throughout each day, moment to moment.  Each moment is important, because life is important.  And what is life, but a series of moments?  We can choose, at each moment, whether to make someone else’s world a better, or worse, place.  The world is not going to just “get better” on its own.  There is no “world”, there are only the individuals who live in it.  The “world” will get better when all of us individually choose to consistently react in the most compassionate way possible.  This is, in a way, related to what Gandhi meant when he said, “You must be the change that you want to see in the world.”  To everyone else, you are part of “the world”.  Therefore, if you change yourself, you do change the world.