The Traffic Light

A bright warm sunny day in Bangalore. First week of April; didn’t seem like onset of summer but did appear like mid summer. As usual, I got ready to work and waited for my cab. Boarded the cab at half past eight. “School vacation has started. Probably for the next two months, we may not expect much traffic” I told my colleague. “Yeah, thats right. Hopefully we would reach office soon” my colleague added. The cab was zooming than usual and crossed Banaswadi. “Wow! This is quick” we exclaimed when it was nine am.

After picking another colleague, we moved on chit chatting. “Should we take a straight route or the inner road of Devasandra?” the cab driver questioned. “Let’s take Devasandra route. We will reach office even sooner” our greedy minds said. We moved on for the next two kilometers hassle free. The cab driver then took an inner-inner road assuming it’d be free too. Unfortunately we saw a huge queue. Appeared to be like a queue at an ATM due to demonestation!

Cleverly he deviated to another road which seemed empty. Overwhelmed by his smartness, we said “Great! We by passed the queue!”. Little did we notice it was a dead end. Realizing it the next moment, we laughed looking at each other. Within the interval of about 30 seconds, we saw three vehicles that followed our cab and met the dead end! We burst out laughing. Slowly the cab moved and by then it was 9:38 am. We ended in the same queue which was now even a kilometer longer than what it was when we first met it.

“Navigation says 30 minutes to reach and four kilometers left” said I. We spoke of funny Bangalore traffic and noticed it was about half an hour already. We hadn’t moved an inch. Slowly we were getting restless. “I’m surprised that even after schools are on vacation, traffic is this bad!” I said. “Oh yes, it’s quite hot and people on bikes must be tired” told my colleague. It was 10:30 am now. “Two hours since we left home and we have traveled only 14 kms” I laughed. “Our bad luck. We should have taken the Outer ring road! Only KR puram would have been blocked. The waiting time should have been only 20 minutes!” told my colleague. “Or probably only the inner road upto KR puram and then ring road should be fine!” suggested I. We looked for navigation in these routes and said “We should have reached office by now!” Finally the cab sailed. “Next traffic update is that there is a congestion in Hoodi” my colleague kept his palm on his forehead. “Remember, the traffic last year during Monsoons? It took us 2.5 hours to reach office. We reached at 11. Let’s see if we break that record” I laughed. “Oh please no” my colleague exclaimed. We reached office at 10:52 am. “Hey we still didn’t break the record! How unfortunate!” I winked and my colleagues laughed. I am sure their mind voices must have cursed me for this statement!

I continued work and then left office at 8 pm. The cab was moving and stood at a traffic signal. My eyes were deeply observing the red light. For a few minutes I was lost. “It took me almost 2.5 hours to reach office this morning. We were overwhelmed and kept on taking the inner routes. It appeared successful in the beginning and we didn’t complain at first. Later when we were struck in traffic, we started feeling restless about our decision and talked about it. We were talking about the road not taken. We imagined that it must have been traffic free. We started praising the route which we curse everyday and said we should have taken it. Momentarily we forgot the first half an hour of our traffic free travel.”

“Isn’t that similar to what we do in life?” my mind questioned. We are the ones often taking a decision of which route we want to take in our life. Until it works perfectly fine for us, we don’t have any complains. We happily traverse in our own way and even tell people at times that we have made a right choice. But the moment it starts failing, we regret a lot. We start talking about the choice we had not picked in life. We spend the rest of our life worrying on why we took a wrong decision and how life would have been the best if we had chosen the alternate path. Who knows if the alternate path was free of hurdles?

How many times have we mentioned “I got an offer with XYZ company but chose this one. Had I chosen that I’d have shone better in life earning a huge salary!”. How many times have we mentioned “I had a property in that area. I sold it. Today the value is in crores. I missed it”. How many times have we mentioned “I bought this car for this price. Now the price is reduced. Had I waited for 2 months, I would have saved a lakh!” These are just few examples. “My bad luck. I did this. Had I done that, I’d have become ——” is something which we keep telling always! We are getting sick of telling ourselves “Had I ___”!

Well, are these regrets worth your time and energy? Do you think you could have reversed the situation? What did we achieve by talking about the regular route this morning? What did we achieve by regretting for taking the other route this morning? Did we arrive office earlier? Were we able to by pass the traffic? Were we able to fly to the regular route? Absolutely nothing!

Likewise regretting in life just takes our time and energy. It fills the environment with only worries and negativity. Do you think you could go back with time and try the road not taken? Probably it was still a worst choice than the life you’re currently living. Probably this life is heaven. No wonder that you regret for a second time even if you got a chance to go back and correct the choice you made.

Feeling that you chose the wrong profession? Feeling that you missed a wonderful relationship? Feeling that you missed an opportunity? Tell yourself “I have chosen it. Right or wrong, I will live by it happily.” Life is about living the moment and not worrying over the mistakes you have made. Treat every mistake as a learning and try not to repeat it. Do not fool yourself imagining the other life.

I saw the traffic light was turning yellow. I then noticed, I was at the fourth signal and there was just one more signal left for me to reach home. The clock ticked 9 pm. “Not sure if this was the fastest. Maybe …” I stopped with a jerk in my mind “Stop it! No more Maybe statements! It’s done” yelled my mind. The traffic light turned green and my eyes were staring at it. Bangalore traffic has taught me something about life. “Thank you Devasandra!” I smiled.