Last week, I wrote a new Quick Read that brings attention to the significant power our thoughts have in shaping our lives. Less than 24 hours later, I found myself referring back to the same ideas I had penned — using them as an aid to reframe an aggravating situation into something more pleasant. The timing couldn’t have been better. With the excerpt still fresh in my mind, it was an opportunity to put my own words into practice and bring it all together.

As we continued to make our way home, driving on a busy, two-lane stretch of road, a car came up quickly behind me. The driver was weaving between the two lanes, inching ever closer to my bumper, when he or she decided to straddle the middle line. Every few seconds their car would speed forward and then slowly drop back a few feet, all the while remaining uncommitted to a single lane. It didn’t take long for me to decide that I didn’t want to deal with such an unpredictable driver. As we reached an intersection, the car behind me lurched again and revved its engine. I turned. 

With that car no longer on our bumper, I realized how frustrated I was to have had to divert from our quick path home. I didn’t know where the road we were on would take us but I knew it would most definitely add more time to our trip. I was also annoyed that I had to change course for someone else’s carelessness. I thought “great, now we’re all upset, trapped in the car even longer, and I can’t just sit back and enjoy the drive; I have to figure out where we are and how to get back home before I’m rendered deaf by the boys’ complaining. Well, it was good while it lasted.”

I’ll admit that this was a minor inconvenience but that’s what makes this anecdote even more important. It wasn’t a big deal but I could have let it affect my whole day. I could have built it up into something it wasn’t instead of allowing myself to move on. A lot of our time can be easily spent feeling aggrieved by mildly annoying situations. And while we can’t avoid these situations entirely, we can try to shift our perspective and, at the very least, choose to keep those moments in the rearview.