How we show up in traffic is how we show up in life.  How we do one thing is how we do most things.  Everything in life is our teacher, our mirror.  We call experiences into our life as a guide to give ourselves opportunities to dissolve our blocks to  deeper experiences of peace and joy.  Everything is present for our benefit.  Everything.  If that pissed you off or depresses you…I get it.  I really do.  I have spent most of my life feeling utterly powerless and hopeless.  I know of that which I speak.  I totally understand if my saying there is hope intensifies your feeling of hopelessness.  Letting my hopelessness thaw into hope has taken more courage then anything else I have ever done.  You are not alone.  Keep reading.

This is a a story about my own life mirrors.  It is a story of how my red light lesson introduced a life practice that has helped my desperately impatient self to find a new way of being.  Once I decided I couldn’t live without hope, I was desperate to find where it lived.

Years ago I was in the midst of my hour long commute to my job as an RN when I had an epiphany at a red light.  I ‘heard’ a voice (heard a thought) that said “enjoy the red light’.  When this type of thought pops into my awareness, I listen.  It has a certain soothing quality to it that feels like the way home when I am lost.  And I sure was feeling lost.

At this particular time, I was in the midst of a separation leading to my upcoming divorce, working as an ER nurse which was sucking the life out of me, and driving an hour to work and back every day while doing 12 hr shifts. I was feeling utterly lost in this life free-fall.  I was in a season of walking through my deepest fears to be free of them.  It was kicking my rear end.  In a way I can’t always explain, I knew I was following the faithful guiding voice within me that was connected to ‘All that Is’.  Even so, at the same time in my “oh so humanness”…I was feeling full of sadness, grief, guilt, overwhelm, and other lovely sticky things.  Life was hard.

I was unsure of my destination even as I was trusting guidance deep within me.  If this path I was on wasn’t really my path, then I was screwed.   I had jumped off the cliff of life and was free falling through the air.  I didn’t know where I would land.  Yet deep within me I believed that I would ‘land’ in the next phase of my life where my joy lived.  My destination was some obscure landscape of trust within my deep self where I would be free to love BIG, not constrained any longer by my fears of judgement, rejection or failure.  My journey was an internal one.

So, on this particular day, I was on my way to my ER job feeling completely unhappy with my life and impatient to find some of this ‘joy’ that I new was the pot of gold at the end of my rainbow.  I wasn’t feelin’ it.  I was in a funk.  There was this one super long light on my way to work.  I always seemed to play a game with it to catch it when it was green.  Most days I did pretty well.  On this particular day, it won.  Damn.  But then I heard the ‘thought’…”Enjoy the red light”.

In that moment of awareness a different way of traveling was available to me.  I ‘got’ that the red light wasn’t the problem…it was my impatience with WAITING that was my problem.  I’m sure those that know me are giggling and rolling their eyes at this statement because I have been known to not wait gracefully.  I often feel allergic to limits that I perceive imposed upon me by life and rules.  What a perfect metaphor traffic is for my allergy!

The truth is that peace is found in deep acceptance of limits and full buy-in of them as servants of order that benefits us (yes, my inner rebel is choking on the truth of this statement).  Honoring the ‘red lights’ in my life, when viewed from the lens of being in service to my highest good, creates a space of openness.  I began to play at red lights.  Now I can often be found murmuring a silent ‘I honor you’ to a red light while finding a awesome song to ‘sit dance’ too.  I’m sure the the drivers around me have often wondered about my sanity…but who cares.

The choices I make at the red lights of my life…are mine to own.  Making red lights work for me is now a creative space of play that has completely facilitated my deeper healing in life.  Yes, I often still go kicking and screaming into them…but the space of possibility always exists for me now if I am able to trust the goodness of life’s pauses and search for the gold in the moment.  In embracing the red lights, I have begun to learn the joy of waiting.

Waiting can be a rich experience of anticipation of knowing that all the goodness we are creating is coming to us.  Waiting in a space of trust for the coming of what we long for is so different then the waiting we experience in the space of  discouragement or hopelessness.  Each serves it’s purpose.  I would never know the joy of waiting if I didn’t also know the hopelessness of waiting.

As the Dali Lama says, “know the rules so well, you can break them effectively”.  And that, my friends is the Art of Waiting at Red Lights.  Find the bliss of waiting…then use your joyful place of inner wisdom to know when to intentionally run the red lights of life or respectfully wait at them.  When you are connected in freedom and self trust to all options and possibilities…you will know your own personal ‘right’ choice.