If you’ve read many of my McKnight’s columns over the years, which unfortunately is time you’ll never have back, you know how I love to draw long-term care lessons from traffic experiences.
I’ve observed personality traits on display on freeway merge ramps. I’ve ranted on parking habits, and riffed about parking spots. I’ve advocated recruitment strategies based on how drivers react to slow-moving geese, learned patience from aggressive motorists and received the gift of perspective while waiting at a train crossing.
Well, another day, another work commute, and I’ve gained yet another traffic epiphany that came, as they always seem to, just when I needed it most.
There’s a route I take every day that requires a right turn onto a busy four-lane road. Rarely do I arrive first in line to make the turn. Usually, I’m stuck waiting behind someone who sits timidly, afraid to pull into traffic even with plenty of opportunity. The longer he or she sits there for no clear reason at all, the angrier I get, defiling my waning inner stillness with angry thoughts which, as a Canadian, I’m forbidden to audibly express.
And of course, all the while I’m on a roll of non-stop interior judgment of what sort of person could possibly be this blind and stupid, which of course leads to thoughts of superiority and condescension. I also do all the little passive aggressive things, like waving my hands in silent but eloquent frustration, or nudging my car forward until our bumpers almost touch. I’m not a honker, though I’m certainly telepathically blasting the horn in my mind. But none of it works, and when the offending driver finally makes a move, I’m in a vastly more negative mood than the peaceful Zen master who left the house.
But that was the old me. Today, as I pulled up to the turn and once again found myself hopelessly trapped behind another typical idiot, a panel truck in the lane to my left entirely blocked my view of the approaching traffic. In other words, I could no longer see what the car in front of me was waiting for, so I was powerless to know for certain whether my nemesis could have moved. Suddenly, I found myself sitting there with remarkable patience, simply because I couldn’t judge what I didn’t know. I still couldn’t move until he did, but I also couldn’t see what he was seeing, or wasn’t. So I was forced to simply accept what was, and felt far less animosity toward the hapless stranger.
Basically, it was a well-timed reminder from then on to focus on what I control in that setting — nothing. Day after day, looking left to identify the many opportunities a series of incompetent drivers had to move ahead had never done anything to actually change or improve the situation. I was still hopelessly blocked. So far better to just stare straight ahead, listen to Portland All-Classical FM at 89.9, and move forward whenever I could.
Once I got to work that day, examples abounded for ways to implement that revelation in personal interactions, and I imagine the same is true as you navigate the sometimes frustrating, inexplicable and inconvenient choices of coworkers in your long-term care facility. People make dumb decisions — they just do, and craning our necks to understand the opportunities they’re missing to make better ones is pointless and counterproductive.
From now on, perhaps we should all just accept the situations, people and actions we don’t remotely control. And stop looking left.
Things I Think is written by Gary Tetz, a two-time national Silver Medalist and three-time regional Gold and Silver Medal winner in the Association of Business Press Editors (ASBPE) awards program, as well as an Award of Excellence honoree in the APEX Awards. He’s been amusing, inspiring, informing and sometimes befuddling long-term care readers worldwide since the end of a previous century. He is a writer and video producer for Consonus Healthcare Services in Portland, OR.
The opinions expressed in McKnight’s Long-Term Care News guest submissions are the author’s and are not necessarily those of McKnight’s Long-Term Care News or its editors.
