Don’t be a pig in the mud

The surest way to make yourself sick is to get angry with someone who doesn’t even know you exist. Don’t do it. PHOTO| FILE| NATION MEDIA GROUP

What you need to know:

  • What this meant is that I’d waste so much time on the road trying to prove a point. My precious time.
  • Sometimes if you cut me off badly I’d race you and get in front of you and drive at 2 km/hr and waste your time.
  • How do you like that now, pineapple-face? Not that these acts of foolishness made me feel better.

The surest way to make yourself sick is to get angry with someone who doesn’t even know you exist. Don’t do it.

I used to hate when matatus cut me off. I’d jostle with them, block them, show them the middle finger, shout at the driver through my open window like a maniac. They’d really enrage me. Bus drivers were worse, with their battered buses streaked with all colours of the rainbow from the many other cars they scratched. They’d lumber towards me on the wrong side of the road and I’d grit my teeth and not budge. I’d be ready to die in my car to prove a point to these idiots.

I would wonder how these guys, these matatu drivers, were people’s fathers. Did they actually have children who called them dad? Wives who left their food in the microwave? Did they get a call from pastor in the village asking them to send a contribution for the church’s roof that is leaking? Were these nincompoops actually respectable people when they went to visit their in-laws and they were served first? I couldn’t fathom it. It seemed surreal that you would have such ill manners and still be a functional human being. I’d dream of hurting them. Of really hurting them. Like get a wet, cold and damp dungeon where I’d chain them in, feeding them stale bread and playing them dreadful music at high decibels.

PRECIOUS TIME

What this meant is that I’d waste so much time on the road trying to prove a point. My precious time. Sometimes if you cut me off badly I’d race you and get in front of you and drive at 2 km/hr and waste your time. How do you like that now, pineapple-face? Not that these acts of foolishness made me feel better. Even after I had done that I’d still carry that anger with me. It would be a monkey on my back. I’d get to the office with the sound of blood rushing in my ear. I’d mumble my good-mornings without making eye contact, then hunker down at my desk, not wanting to speak to another human being. I’d sit at my desk and feel angry and I’d have no appetite for my breakfast, leaving my cereal sitting there like court evidence.

I’d not be able to write a proper sentence thereafter. My thoughts would ramble on the page like a wounded predator. My work would be sprinkled with unkind words, negative energy spilling unrestrained through my paragraphs, remnants of my morning in traffic with matatu drivers.

One day when I was busy minding my own business on the road, being a good citizen, some matatu got into the road abruptly and I stepped on the breaks in time. I raced him to overtake him (my favourite aggression) and as I passed him I looked at him and he didn’t even look like he knew he had done something wrong. He was driving on happily, chatting with a passenger.

The coin dropped that day. These guys didn’t care, I realised. They didn’t see their transgressions as annoying or inconveniencing or churlish. They would do something foolish at this intersection and they would forget about it as fast as they committed it. They would then carry on with their work and lives. They would later go home and eat with their families and watch late night news and they would not even remember me. I, on the other hand, would be the one doing mad things on the road, shouting, showing fingers, mouthing unprintables, acting self-righteous on the road. I would be the one to carry my anger through the morning ruining my sentences and weakening my paragraphs and filing copy with malice. While my blood pressure would spike theirs would remain stable.

MORE NOTABLY

But even more notably, while we jostled for supremacy on the road I realised at that point that was no difference between me and them. You wrestle with a pig in mud, you are a pig. They had recruited me into the great hall of fame of idiocy. I had become crude and unsavoury. They had stripped me of culture and class. I had become one of them.

One day I stopped. I stopped shouting on the road. I stopped jostling. I stopped feeling aggrieved. If they are rushing and edging and nosing, I let them through. If they do something foolish to me on the road, I don’t even look at them. I treat them like I’d treat a scab: let it be. And it’s worked out so much better. I get to the office in the same mood I left the house in. My car is never in any danger of being scratched because I’m trying to compare cajones. I see no idiocy and hear no idiocy and say no idiocy. My internal organs are probably the happier for that. I always say that karma is a female dog and these matatu drivers are always finding theirs every week. So if I see them involved in a fender bender, the driver standing there with the owner of the other vehicle I always think of Theodore Parker’s famous quote, “The moral arc of the universe is long but it bends towards justice.” If you are reading this and you were like me, walk away from this madness.

Also, if you are reading this and you know someone renting out a wet, damp and cold dungeon... you know, just for sh**s and giggles.