Relative Something

No two persons experience the same reality. I understand that the guy speeding up to get around me, and honking his horn as he rushed to his exit onto the cloverleaf, thought I was all wrong to be accelerating to freeway speed to enter traffic instead of stopping to allow him to exit without slowing down, but it is difficult for me to feel in the wrong. Wouldn’t he want to be slowing down in order to exit while I am speeding up to enter? In the grand scheme of things, does that mean we are both right? He will be telling someone about me being wrong to do what I did, just as I want to say he is wrong for what he did.

If I ran the world, everything would glide along like clockwork. As it was, we reached a stalemate at the end of the distance between clovers, where I slammed on the brakes and he got across in front of me to slam on his brakes into the exit circle and I had to then use the shoulder to accelerate and enter traffic.

Maybe he had been watching the Tour de France and was in a racing frame of mind and couldn’t bring himself to consider slowing down to merge. One of the tricks I use in attempt to clear the angst that such a conflict creates is to imagine that his reality included a genuine emergency, because if so, wouldn’t I be more than happy to pause to let him rush by? Still, I feel some regret, wondering why I missed reading the situation more quickly and sensing his need before I got myself pinned down on the flat with no momentum to safely merge.

Is it unfair to hope that he is regretting not noticing I was quickly accelerating to enter traffic and he could easily slide in behind me as he slowed to exit, executing the fine art of the merge? I guess I don’t get to define his reality.

Today is the first mountain stage of this year’s Tour de France! I’m going to put that squarely into my reality. Join me there.