You never know when there will or won’t be traffic backups due to collisions. You can’t plan on them. But when we’re lucky enough to simply be stuck in traffic caused by them, we can take a minute to submit to what is: incidents we cannot control or back our way out of.
Take a minute to be grateful. Grateful the only impact on us is a delay. Grateful if we are fortunate enough to have a reliable vehicle to wait for what’s next. Grateful that even if we don’t — even if we are stuck with a beater-overheater or a low tank of gas — that this is unlikely to kill us or cause us irreperable harm.
Grateful for every situation we just have to practice submitting to, and finding moments of peace within. Within the situation … within ourselves. Grateful we are not the person honking uselessly. Grateful we are not the person who decided to pass everyone on the shoulder. Grateful we do not have whatever reason he had for doing so.
Grateful for all of the people and systems in place to help sort out this mess and wave us patiently through it. Grateful we cannot see what harm befell the people in the accident. Grateful we are not the person we can hear hollering, and that we do not have any of their possible reasons for doing so.
Grateful for the technology we have to contact anyone who may be waiting for us to tell them we will be late. Glad it is not our fault we are late. Grateful we can let people know not to worry; we are not the ones in the terrible accident, we are merely in the traffic backed up because of it.
Grateful the people we are stuck in this situation with are doing their best to get through it without making things worse.
These miles of cars. These thousands of brake lights. The odds being so highly in our favor that we will in fact make it to our next destination alive. Aware that we really know what is up the road or around the next corner, and we do not know how much time we have left.