In LA people’s favorite hate fest is traffic, as if traffic where in fact the very thing that was limiting them from ever accomplishing anything.

“I’m not on time!”
“People are terrible drives!”
“Why is everyone driving like such assholes today?!”

It’s totally bad… Except traffic is always like this… How you are is different. I personally listen to classical music loud, almost painfully and try to lull myself into serenity and high planes of thought and love, but undoubtably it will be an orchestral movement reaching crescendo after crescendo ever building upon itself until I realize I haven’t exhaled in a full two minutes and maybe it would be best to try a different tactic. It works normally, the symphony I mean. But when it doesn’t, I do a loose meditation. I’m not driving with my eyes closed. But I count the lengths on my inhales and exhales and try to not attach judgements to the drivers around me, and more specifically myself…

Cause it’s not what’s going on out there that is off, it’s what’s going on inside of me that’s off.

I try to acknowledge what is causing me to be such a terror. There is a term for it, it’s called free-floating hostility, which once harnessed towards an object outside of self allows a full release of pent-up rage, that in my mind literally just floats back to me moments later… Because well I did not deal with the WHY of my hostility I just tried to discharge it all over traffic. But it’s like all 7 year olds eventually learn to say, I’m rubber and you’re glue whatever you say bounces off of me and sticks to you.

Seriously, that might be one of the greatest parables of our ages. And we “know” it at 7, and yet we don’t understand for much longer than that, our upset is rarely with others… The words we throw out only find purchase on ourselves. I am trying to remember that everyday. A simple children’s rant is running through my mind as I through out my hostility and watch as it was never about traffic, it was never about the struggle to get there on time. It was always the struggle to sit with myself, while the inner horns are blasting, and everything is halted, stalled and going nowhere. Or so I judge myself. Your interior traffic may look very different. I hope things are moving freely in there, the green light to your dreams. But if you find yourself stuck in the inner traffic… just sit with it. There is nowhere to go and nothing else to do until the jam clears. Then you’ll be moving right along, back in the flow… traffic is a gift the universe gives you when you need to slow down and be with yourself… I wonder what gets you in a jam?