When you're running late and get stuck in a traffic jam, especially the long ones which never seem to end, you seem to have no choice but to get frustrated. Its beyond your control unless you're Bruce Almighty or belong to a different human species called 'Morning-persons'. Getting Murphy to explain such things beyond your control only adds to the frustration. And Einstein will tell you that if you get stuck in a traffic jam for 5 minutes, it will seem like half an hour, but when you sit and chat with a pretty girl for half an hour, it'll seem like 5 minutes. Why would anyone want to sit on a hot stove these days? And you cant even get into a microwave oven, forget the harmful radiations!
A different perception can help in reducing your level of frustration atleast. Consider what would have made you happy at that instant. Green light. Consider what would have made you most frustrated at that point. The light turning red when you're just about to cross the signal. For a uniformly distributed traffic signal controlled by a relativity-ignorant electronic timer at some average peak time of the day, your wait time is inversely proportional to your distance from the signal. So the farther away you're from a signal, the lesser your wait time at the signal. Your level of frustration is directly proportional to your wait time, excluding the other random acts of unkindness (like Pollution) the world inflicts upon you to make you even more frustrated. And your level of happiness is inversely proportional to your level of frustration, unless you're way too depressed or happily driving under influence. So the next time you get stuck in a traffic jam, feel frustrated only when you're the first in the waiting line. At all other times only decrease the tangential angle of your smiling arc, contemplating the philosophical mysteries of life so you can blog about it.
No comments:
Post a Comment