It’s okay to relax and enjoy the moment

The number of registered cars in the province of Ontario alone skyrocketed from 843,731 in 1960 to over 5 million in the late 1990's, according to the Natco Auto Leasing newsletter (Winter, 1999). With more cars on the roads, traffic gets congested. In fact, if you live in Toronto, you can expect another one million vehicles and five million daily car trips by 2019.

The end result will be a lot of time spent in traffic tie-ups. If you have the options of telecommuting or even flexible work hours, you might be able to alleviate it somewhat. Or if you have the option of rapid transit you might be able to pass the time more productively. But for most of us, we had better resolve ourselves to an hour or more of travel time each day.

How can we use this time wisely? Cell phones have been shown to contribute to accidents. And if they're already being banned from cars in Germany, who knows whether they'll still be allowed here in ten or twenty years from now. Listening to audiotapes is a possibility, but being attentive to tapes while constantly turning in traffic could be tricky.

The most useful coping mechanism is one that is foreign to most of us - going with the flow. We seem to be so conditioned to utilize every minute productively that we have lost the ability to simply relax and enjoy the moment. Delay a flight for half an hour and watch people grab for their cellular phones or whip out their laptops. Like swimmers fighting the current we wear ourselves out in activity while making little progress. What's wrong with drifting downstream a little? Perhaps we could do with a change in scenery and we might as well conserve our energy for the long haul.

Time does seem to fly for most of us. And the more we fight it the faster it seems to go. Ironically, time doesn't move at all; we do. Time will be the same one hundred years from now long after we have passed through it. Why struggle against the natural flow when we could use our energy directing our course?

How many famous people throughout history, whether it is Michelangelo, Joan of Arc or Martin Luther King would say that they owed their success to utilizing every minute of idle time? It's more likely they would tell us they had a purpose in life and they steered towards their goal in spite of the unavoidable delays along the way. When Isaac Assimov, a science fiction writer with over a hundred books to his credit, was asked how he could write so relentlessly and so prolifically, he replied that he was blessed with plenty of interruptions. Successful people go with the flow.

Fighting the flow can breed impatience and lead to anger and even rage. The U.S.-based Insurance Institute of Highway Safety found fatal vehicle crashes at traffic lights increased 19% between 1992 and 1996. The change is attributed to red light runners. A Toronto Star article (August 29, 1998) quoted British Airways as saying there had been a 400% rise in air rage incidents globally over the past three years. Among the reasons cited for air rage in more recent articles were delays in boarding, postponed takeoffs and giant lineups at check-in. An article in the Markham Economist & Sun (July 15, 1999) summed it up well by saying, “Rage is the product of life in the fast lane where everyone wants to even the score.”

Fighting the flow can dampen our creativity, dull our thinking and distort our reasoning. It can affect us physiologically, causing stress, high blood pressure and headaches. It can even change our personality, converting us into no-nonsense, fast-talking, fast-moving individuals with a distorted sense of time urgency.

The next time you drive to work, pay attention to the people in the cars next to you. Are they relaxed, enjoying the moment? Or are they applying make-up, fixing their hair, reading the paper, eating breakfast, talking on the telephone or sorting something on the seat beside them? Those are the people who will have difficulty coping with gridlock. They are the ones who will have to learn how to relax, to let go, to go with the flow.