A car cut me off this morning while I was biking to work down
Arlington Street next to the Commons. I saw it coming, and although
shouting at the car didn’t seem to make it aware of me, I probably was
not in great peril.
Nonetheless, my adrenline is pumping when I get to the red light
where the car is stopped. I don’t have my happy face on when I shout to
the driver, “You have to look before you merge!” The car’s occupants
are a young couple, about my age, and the woman in the passenger
seat, after the driver rolls down his windows, shouts back, “Isn’t
there a bike lane?” — to which I reply, as coherently as possible,
that bikes have a right to occupy the road.
By this point, though, the woman has, having said her piece, settled
back into her seat and isn’t listening. Whatever rational part of my
mind that was keeping me under control flees, and I descend to
name-calling, various obscene hand motions, and at one, point, when the
driver revs his car at me, the “Bring it on” gesture (which the driver,
thankfully, did not take me up on).
Almost
immediately I regret what I did, because whatever perverse pleasure I
took from telling this couple off (and just about every external
feature of the two in their late-model Yuppie-mobile, including the
fact that the driver looked an awful lot like me, set off half the
emotional triggers in my head), I certainly haven’t (1) made the roads
safer for myself or other cyclists; (2) increased the happy quotient of
the planet; or (3) behaved appropriately / compassionately /
rationally.
I don’t give monks any credit for maintaining serenity when they sit
in temples on the mountainside and sip tea. True serenity is keeping
your cool when your reptilian mind is screaming, “Fight!”
