Totally Fulfilled
One day, my mom called my cell phone while I was driving. She said that I might want to come to Virginia to see my grand- mother because she wasn’t doing well, and my mom feared she might not live long. Because I lived in Phoenix, I didn’t get to see my grandmother as much as I would have liked, so it was hard news. I wanted to get to Virginia right away. I have to admit I was a bit distracted. I went to pull over, and I accidentally cut another driver off in traffic. Well, the guy I cut off flipped me off, yelling out his window, “Hey, a****e, why don’t you get off your cell phone and learn how to drive?!” As he sped away, I could see that he was angry and waving his hands. He judged me instantly without considering why I might have needed to pull over quickly. In his eyes, I was just a guy in a Mercedes on the cell phone, and automatically he judged me, got angry, and wasted his energy being furious with me. That man could have never known my circumstances; he just judged. If he had had the chance to listen to my phone con- versation, would he have reacted differently? What if he knew in a second what kind of person I was, and that I didn’t mean any harm to him at all? No doubt he would have acted with more compassion. Why, then, wouldn’t it
Why waste even one second of energy on something negative, something that only hurts you?
make sense to just not judge anyone when you don’t know the facts? Why waste even one second of energy on something negative, something that only hurts you?
There are always an infinite number of reasons why someone may cut you off or drive poorly, and none of them have anything to do with you. What if the driver is ill? What if he or she is rush- ing to the hospital for an emergency? What he or she just lost a job and is distracted? What if the driver has a disability? What if, for the rest of your life, every time a person cut you off in traffic, no matter how it looked, you said to yourself, or even
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