I was driving to the airport this morning to catch a flight to West Palm Beach.  I will be down there for a couple of meetings before flying back on Saturday.  It’s a quick trip but I always appreciate the chance for a few hours of sunshine and warmth.

I was starting to think about today’s post, and was mulling over a few ideas.  As I was on the Long Island Expressway, I noticed a car coming up behind me very quickly.  The driver got close to my car and then aggressively switched over to the middle lane.  Twenty feet down the road, he (I assumed it was a he) switched again into the right-hand land so as to pass a car that had slowed in front of him.  This shifting between lanes continued, and I could see the driver ahead of me by about fifty feet as he eventually shifted back into the far left passing lane.

I immediately cast aspersions on the driver. He must be some entitled SOB who believes he owns the road and that everyone should get out of his way, I thought.  He probably works as a trader on Wall Street, as my imagination continued to create a portrait of a man of whom I hadn’t even gotten a good glimpse, and is one of those guys you would hate to play tennis or golf with as he is probably a sore loser, or an ungracious winner.

The worse the imagined picture of him got, the angrier I became.  How dare he risk our lives just so he can have his own way?  What kind of ass must he be?  I even thought, for a brief second, of speeding up just to give him an evil eye…or worse.

And then my perspective changed.  What if he just gotten a call that his child was ill or injured?—too many Florida parents had received a similar call the day before as another gunman opened fire on a school.  Perhaps he works in a hospital and is needed to deal with a critical patient.  Or he could be running late to a job interview, the first he has had in six months, and is stressed out about how to support his family if this interview goes poorly.

As this shift in thinking happened, I noticed that my blood pressure had dropped.  The anger I had felt started to be replaced by sympathy.  I began to wonder what was behind his actions and stopped assuming.  I realized that it wasn’t my place to judge and it definitely wasn’t my place to enact my own brand of vigilante justice.  I let him race down the road, and with it my watch my own sense of having been wronged disappear.

Then I realized, how often had my actions been misconstrued?  How many times had I been cursed behind my back?  And I grew thankful for all those people who had given me the benefit of the doubt.  It’s not often that I wanted to be known as a “doubting Thomas”—but I now know that there are times when the gift of doubt can be the most powerful gift to give.