In times, when high levels of stress are causing us to forget the whole ‘love your neighbor’ deal, our aggression is suppressed daily, only to be released at the most unexpected times. Most of us manage to deal with it, after all there are a lot of modern remedies to control your stress and anxiety levels: doctors and pharmacists doing a pretty swell job, all you have to say ‘I’m feeling blue’, and here comes prescription for Prozac or Zoloft to numb the pain. But what if you stuck in traffic and just realized that you forgot your medicine today and crash from yesterdays high is causing you to feel like an animal strapped in a corner? I’m sure guy in a car behind you who seems giving you dirty looks, but in reality checking his newly plucked eyebrows in a rear view mirror, will not add to your cheerful mood.

There are different forms of ‘Road Rage’ that can be expressed on a simple chart ranging from mild: simply giving a finger, or honking your horn, to extreme: where one actually pulls out the gun and starts firing. But in reality these two are not separate; they are interrelated, just as an addiction to watching reality shows and snorting cocaine, they still remain under addiction, which is one and the same problem. As long as one exists the other will always follow. So maybe, before sharing our ability of raising a middle finger to express our inner beauty to an elder lady who just cut us of at an intersection, we stop and think, what do we achieve by this act, does it have any meaning, will it help us reach our destination point? Because after all, that’s what it all comes down to, we are not getting into a car to just drive around and express ourselves all day, we getting into a car because we need to get somewhere with a least amount of headache and effort.

The fact of the matter remains that, as we so called progress, so does the anger, aggression, hatefulness, and intolerance to others. Perpetually, we are encouraged in our society to achieve, succeed, win no matter how high the cost is, and who suffers along the way, as long as it’s not us, it is ok. Same philosophy applies to the simple example of the road rage, where we cease to recognize, that anger will not solve the problem, that screaming at somebody in the car next to us, will not help us make it, to our back waxing appointment, on time. Only by stopping and seeing our own flaws that we are able to redirect our actions to the more logical and sane result, only by accepting and seeing the falseness in our character that we enable ourselves to move forward without causing any harm to others.