Don’t stop you fool!

There is a thing that is frustrating me for quite a while. Frustrating up to the point that my heart beat rate goes up quite a lot. Yes! Pure anger!

A little bit of context: drivers often tend to stop for bikes while the car has priority. This leads to confusion as bikes get used to get priority when they haven’t and cars stop on places where they are holding up traffic flow unnecessarily. As at this type of crossing where the bike lane is parallel to the sidewalk, it often happens cars need to stop for the pedestrians since they have precedence while bikes have to give precedence to cars. This causes weird situations where as a biker you stop for the cars while the cars might stop for pedestrians.

What do you do as a biker if the car stops (for the pedestrian)? You go, of course. But not if you are well educated as I am. I will stop when a car is nearing the crossing so it can continue its way. So far so good. But what if the car decided to stop and give me as a biker precedence even if I do not have it? I will get irritated and wave the car to go on, or worse, shout at the driver to go on because stopping there is holding up the traffic leaving the roundabout, just to find out the car did not stop for me, but for pedestrians trying to cross the road.

Ouch! That is embarrassing! But not for all the other situations where the drivers did stop for letting me as a biker cross even when I do not have precedence. I know I have a point here and drivers, bikers and pedestrians should just stick to the rules, that would be the safest option for all. But why, why are there engineers inventing this type of crossings? It would have bee far easier to just give precedence to both bikes and pedestrians.

But that is not so much the point I want to discuss. It is about me reacting to this situation in anger and frustration, so much that I did not see the real situation anymore and got into a very embarrassing situation. And yes, it did not happen once, it happened twice…

Time to look at my reactions of anger and frustration without the justification of the actual fact that cars should stick to the rules. So, I analysed how in time I allowed frustration to build up in myself by feeding it with these events where I was given precedence and actually thriving on it, almost looking forward without noticing it, to the next episode, so I had again a justification to get more frustrated and angry.

The mechanism I discovered is that I willingly was looking for situations that would provoke me just to feed my hungry anger with negative energy. That was a scary discovery. I was allowing myself to do something that was destructive. Using self-forgiveness as I learned to apply in the DIP course I have been able to stop this pattern. I can now approach this type of crossings being confident I will not get frustrated or angry. I will use my common sense and cross if a car stops making sure the crossing is clear as quickly as possible.

From this experience I’ve learned two things, that I have the tendency to allow myself to search for situations that will feed my frustration in order to justify being angry as I usually do not allow myself to show anger and do something about it. And I’ve learned that being a little more flexible in sticking to the rules might benefit everybody, as long as I am using common sense and make sure there is a benefit for all.