A small collision

As I got into my car at a crowded parking lot, the woman sitting in the car next to me honked and pulled down the window. “You just hit the side of my car extremely hard with your door,” she yelled. Taken aback, I said I was sorry – with a tiny sarcastic edge, almost unnoticeable. “Well, be careful,” she said, as she rolled the window back up.

I moved on, but I couldn't let this go. First, in silent monologue, I defended myself: I didn’t really hit her car, or if I did it certainly wasn’t hard – maybe I just bumped it lightly with my shoulder bag. Then I tried to turn the moral tables: she can’t expect her car not to be touched in a tight space; she must be ridiculously over-protective; she was way out of line. Then it got personal: I told myself I didn’t like her looks, or her voice, or her bug fat car. I slotted her into a category of people who repel me: arrogant, self-righteous. I regretted being so passive and searched for some stinging retort I could have used.

Then, because I am working on this topic, I tried something else: I tried to imagine it from her point of view – what she might have been feeling and thinking. I didn’t have much to work with, since I hadn’t actually talked to her and knew nothing about her. But it’s not hard to imagine scenarios. Maybe she was having one of those incredibly irritating days when everything goes wrong – she dropped the car keys down between the seats, she got to her appointment late, the person had left, she rushed to try to catch up, she got a speeding ticket; and now, on top of it all, this jerk opens his door into her new car and doesn’t even apologize. I've certainly gotten grumpy at times like that.

I have no idea if the reality was anything like this. But what was startling to me was that as soon as I started to think in this way, my obsessive anger abated. I didn’t feel the need to square the moral tables, to get even, or to justify myself to myself. My energy was moving in a different direction, with a different emotional tone. I was in an empathizing mode instead of a self-protective mode. I no longer felt lingering shadows of self-doubt and potential guilt. I felt much better about myself, as well as less angry.

There’s something profound here. The way I reacted at first is the way irrational conflicts begin, up to wars and genocides. They’re driven by the feeling of “We’re good, you’re bad; when you criticize us it just confirms how good we are and how bad you are; you can’t get away with that; we’ll show you.” I was feeling all of that, and if I had actually retorted as I was playing out in my mind I can imagine it could quickly have escalated into heated words, and maybe calling the cops, maybe a lawsuit.

The second way felt much better and was much less likely to lead to conflict. But it took an unfamiliar mental effort to get there, and it took continued effort to stay there. I can still, as I write this, catch myself slipping back into the initial anger – how dare she! I can wrest myself out of it by replaying the process of imagining her perspective. But it's clear that this is not natural.

We bump into each other more and more as the world gets tighter. If we’re not going to be fighting all the time we need institutions to help us understand each other – habits of empathy, mutual expectations (she might have tried the same on me), dispute-resolution systems based on it (not just trying to judge who’s right).