Practice

In any of the articles that you can read about what road rage is and how to avoid it, it all can be boiled down to one thing. It happens because we’re stressed, and the solution: stop being stressed about it.

That’s way easier said than done. That is actually more like one of those puzzles where someone hands you a candle, a box of matches, and a box of thumb tacks and you just stare at it until you can get out of your own head long enough to think outside the box and see the solution to the problem. What I mean is that the instinctive response to ‘stop being stressed about it’ is “I can’t.” We think "Easy for you to say!" because we don't have the option of magically making things better. We can't just decide to have a shorter commute, or to drive at a time other than rush hour, or make other people stop being so inconsiderate. So we think that we can't change anything so we can't stop being stressed about it. But, we can change ourselves.

I've had to come up with a few actual behaviors to ‘stop being stressed about it’, so I thought I might share them.

Here are some ways that I practice Road Relish...

…told through clichés.

It turns out that I wrote more than is sensible for a single page, so I broke it into pages by cliché.

1. It is what it is

2. Knowledge is power

3. You're either part of the problem or part of the solution

4. Idle hands are the Devil's playthings

5. It's all relative