photo by me

I’ve written about my drives to work and how scary they can be because I’m surrounded by huge pickups and SUVs my entire drive.

Things have changed recently. I’m stilly surrounded by all of those vehicles but my driving has changed.

I like to drive fast. It’s exhilerating. It’s exciting. It’s like living on the edge and taking a chance.

I realized, though, that I’m burning more gas doing that. I also realized that I get this aggressive feeling going when I do so and then I get that road rage thing seeping into me. That’s scary.

But what really made me think about it was a faculty member here at the university. I was working with her on setting up a blog for one of her courses. We started talking about the things she’ll be discussing and how it will be used in the course.

She works in geography and spends a lot of time working in transportation and planning. She watches traffic patterns. She pays attention to the ways things work within traffic.

She told me that the speed limits aren’t arbitrary. They are set up for many reasons, including safety and good traffic flow. She told me that when people speed, it really screws up the way traffic flows and that’s why we have traffic jams.

So I started thinking about it.

And I started leaving home about ten minutes earlier just to test it all out.

I’ve noticed a few things.

First, I’m not as stressed. Even when someone cuts me off (which they seem to do more because I’m just not speeding with the rest of them), I laugh it off. I’m going to get there. I’ll be safe when I do. And I won’t have a knot in my stomach.

Second, I tend to drive in a relatively car-free zone. People are speeding around me and passing me, leaving me to have the entire area to myself. That’s kind of nice.

And third, I don’t sit at lights a whole lot. I tend to cruise right through them.

This does work better during the morning hours when the roads are a little less busy than the evening but even then, it still works pretty much the same.

I’ve removed a stressor from my life.

And it was easy.