It's Only a Green Light

Do you ever get into one of those moods, the kind that makes you start thinking waaaay more than you should? And everything you think about is kind of “deep”. Well that’s the mood I was in earlier today while driving to work. It sounds funny to tell this story now, because I’m not really in that mood anymore, but at the time it was almost like an eye opener.
I was driving along in my car, doing the same mindless things I always do while going to work. (Yelling at drivers, making sure nothings in my teeth, and generally driving way to fast) when I got stuck behind an extremely slow moving car. Sometimes when this happens you honk or speed around them, maybe you flash them a slightly inappropriate signal before passing, but sometimes (like me today) you’re so deep in thought that you don’t really realize you’re going five under the speed limit (which was 40) until you’ve been doing it for awhile. I wasn’t really running late, per se, but I wasn’t really on time either, and I definitely didn’t have time to horse around with “speed impaired” vehicles. However, I was also very tired and so making the attempt to speed around the car just didn’t appeal to me at the time. But after a couple miles, I decided I wasn’t getting anywhere so I went around him. As I went around him we were approaching a street light, and I just happened to get through the light as it turned yellow and he was far enough behind me that he had to stop. For some weird reason (blame it on the deep mood) I started thinking about how that decision could have affected my day, or not even that, but how it could have possibly affected my life. And that seems like a really ridiculous thought, right? How could something so minor change events in my life? Well I got to thinking about how the decision to move around the car just then caused me to get to pass through the green light. Well, let’s look at the obvious first. Maybe I could have gotten into a car accident if I hadn’t of made that light, or maybe I could have because I DID make the light, either way, something could have happened that wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t moved around the car just then. Or maybe because I got to work a minute earlier than I would have, I didn’t see or talk to someone that might have said something bad or negative (just throwing out possibilities) that would have caused me to have a bad day. Maybe that bad day would have carried into the rest of my day and caused me to make a poor decision later, maybe I would have yelled at someone or done something else that caused another reaction that ultimately changed what would have happened the next day, which would have changed the next week, then month, and so on. Is it really so unrealistic to consider the idea that every choice we make really CAN effect our lives like that? It seems to be an extreme idea at first, but how many times has a bad driver or a bad customer at work caused you to have a bad day? And how many times has that caused you to be in a bad mood and possibly pass that on to someone else? And how often have you had a fight you wouldn’t have had or an encounter that wouldn’t have happened, had you not been feeling the way you did the previous day? It’s not really that unreasonable. Of course it could work in reverse too. The day could be better instead of worse. Think about this scenario, say I was on my way to buy a lottery ticket (which I do not buy, I accepted long ago that I wasn’t lucky) and passing that car got me there one minute ahead of someone else that was going to buy a lottery ticket at the same time. Say that I win. (Yeah, this is definitely turning into a fantasy) What if I hadn’t of gone around the car? What if I’d shown up a minute later? The next guy buying the ticket just then would have gotten the winning one. Interesting eh? Well I think so anyways. We always think of major events changing our lives, like 9/11 or the war or gas prices or an assassination (heh heh heh, that was a completely random thought process by the way) and they do affect us, but how much time do we spend thinking about the little things that could change our lives forever? Yeah, I guess that's a bit dramatic, after all, it was only a green light. But don’t you ever just wonder, what if?

Ps. The NYC series will continue, as soon as I have time to compile more stories. Along with those will be the punching story. Where I get attacked. It’s true. It happened. Its science. Don’t question it.