The rain fell hard on my way to work today. It was one of those rains you could hear over your radio—one that made you slow down because you couldn’t see very far ahead of you. It’s been a dry summer and my lawn is a disaster, so I’m not complaining. We needed the water here. But rain is always better when you’re lying in bed than when you’re on your way to work.
There was something that nagged at me, though. There was a car in the lane to the right of me that stayed just behind my rear bumper for most of the drive. The weather was bad enough as it was, but this woman drove her car into a terrible spot and just stayed there. I’d slow down a little to let her pass, but she slowed down, too. I’d speed up a little to try to pass her, but she’d speed up just enough that I couldn’t.
It went on this way for too long. I knew she was there, just over my shoulder and just out of sight, and I felt stuck. I couldn’t change lanes. I couldn’t move much at all. I was paralyzed in motion, in the middle of a rainstorm. What was already a difficult drive (after months of not driving more than a handful of miles at a time) was made more difficult by something I couldn’t see but knew was there, just out of sight.
There’s no real end to this. The rain started letting up, I was able to change lanes just before my exit, and I pulled into my small parking lot at work and sat there for a few minutes, thinking. There are some experiences that are best understood as metaphors. This was one of those.
We all have blind spots, and people occasionally end up in them. It’s only when they linger there too long that things get hard. Beside us, behind us, or ahead of us are all fine. We can navigate that. But people in our blind spots eventually make difficult storms that much worse. It's better to see and get on with things, one way or another.
Than again, it's better to be in bed during a rainstorm. There's no other meaning needed to appreciate that.
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