Traffic Jam

A little while ago, I needed to pick something up from the store. The parking was crazy, so I double-parked a little way up the road, where it’s wider, and told my daughter to run in to the store and get what I needed.
 
Suddenly, a truck pulled out of a side-street, and couldn’t get past me. I had to move forward a few meters – which I did, but now, I was in a part of the road that was much narrower. Now, it was much more of a squeeze for the other cars to get past, but because I drive a small car, it was OK. But I started to feel a bit uncomfortable.
 
Next, some massive all-wheel-drive Silver Tourneo decided to copy me, and double-parked straight behind me. That car was much wider, which is when all the beeping and blaring horns started up. I started scanning the pavement for my daughter: where was she, already?
 
Usually, the traffic on that particular street is pretty quiet. If you get more than 10 cars an hour, it’s very unusual. But on this particular day, G-d decided to send about 50 cars down the road while I was double-parked, one after another. The Silver Tourneo gave up trying to double-park and drove off. But now, people were really mad, and I had about three people slow down just so they could glare at me.
 
I shrugged my shoulders, pretended I was sorry – but what could I do? If I drove off now, my daughter wouldn’t know where I’d gone and would get worried and anxious. Maybe she’d try to walk down the street looking for me, and then I’d spend the next hour trying to find her…
 
My yetzer hara (evil inclination) really pulled a good move on me, and I was convinced there was no option but to stick out all the beeping and glaring until she was back in the car.
 
Then, G-d sent me a red-haired lady with a walking stick and an attitude. Ooooh, was she going to give me a piece of her mind. She walked up to me (she was a pedestrian, not a driver) – stood in the middle of the road on the driver’s side (blocking even more of the cars, but never mind) – and started berating me very loudly.
 
Who did I think I was? Couldn’t I see I was blocking all the traffic? Did I think I was so important that the rules didn’t apply to me? Did I think I owned the street?
 
I bristled. Initially, I reacted quite forcefully, and explained to her that my kid was in a store, and wouldn’t know where I’d gone if I drove off now.
 
“So what!”, she shot back. “Find a solution!”
 
“What’s the solution?” I asked her, still fuming.
 
“I don’t know, park and then walk back to her!” That’s when the spell broke, and I realized that actually, I deserved every piece of indignation this woman was throwing at me.
 
I told her she was right, and that I was in the wrong. She didn’t know what to say after that and walked off. I found a parking spot literally 10 seconds away, round the corner, and walked back, just as my kid was leaving the store. Really, the whole thing was no big deal.
 
So why it had been so hard to admit that I was in the wrong?
 
OK, I hadn’t deliberately tried to inconvenience people; OK, unexpected ‘circumstances’ (that is, G-d) had made the whole double-parking thing so awkward. OK, I did have some genuine concern about losing my daughter – although it’s not like I live in New York or London.
 
Even though I hadn’t planned it to be the way it actually turned out, I was still in the wrong. And it had been so hard to see that, and to admit that, and to say sorry. The short-term pain of saying I’d made a mistake and of humbling myself before the raging red-haired lady, was initially so distasteful to me that I almost couldn’t do it.
 
What, I have to admit to myself that I’m actually in the wrong?! And then I have to admit that to this raging red-haired lunatic who’s really going to enjoy rubbing my face in it?! No way, Jose.
 
But then, I remembered that I’m trying to be a G-d fearing person. I’m trying to be a person who lives their emuna, their belief that G-d is running every little detail of the world, and my life.
 
Once I stopped listening to the propaganda from the Yetzer Hara, that had me trapped in self-righteousness, and rigid thinking, and arrogantly thinking I’m always right and justified in every thing I do – I realized that G-d had set me up. G-d had sent me a test, to see if I would accept some short-term, unpleasant, but otherwise harmless pain for some serious long-term gain.
 
And I didn’t score too highly on it.
 
Rebbe Nachman always teaches that those people who aren’t prepared to suffer a little, will end up suffering a lot. I’ve had a dose of that recently, and I can tell you that compared to being sick, depressed or broke, being yelled at by a lunatic with red hair for something you actually did wrong really is the easy option.