This one is easy…..both instant karma (if I believed in such a thing :) and a lesson learned.

I used to get really ticked off (in an almost-road-rage-kind-of-way) when I was driving on the freeway and someone would signal (occasionally in California drivers are at least a bit courteous…signal…and then cut you off :( and then move into my lane in front of me with barely a car-length of space to do so. And that would force me to hit my brakes to create a new distance of safety.

I grew up in So. Cal. and, as it became more populated, this would happen more often. I eventually left So. Cal. for the SF Bay Area and, as traffic got worse here, I began experiencing similar problems. So I had been dealing with this for a long time :(

Then, one day, I noticed something interesting happened. I’m driving on the freeway and, sure enuf, someone cut in front of me. Yeah, I was pissed off, but within a minute or so, someone did the exact same thing to the driver who had just done it to me. That got my attention and instead of getting pissed anymore, I watched as the same thing seemed to happen about 80–90% of the time.

I eventually got to the point where I no longer got (too) pissed off when someone did a dumb and dangerous move like that. In fact, when it did happen I would count to myself and usually by the time I had reached 100, the universe returned the favor to the driver who had just done it to me.

In the end, I got a “2-fer”: karma for the idiot who put my safety in jeopardy for his/her own personal needs and urgencies, and a more relaxed (and safer) driving attitude for me knowing that “the universe does abhor a vacuum” in a what-goes-around-comes-around kind of way :)