Snap Out of It!
I reminded at this moment of a scene from the 1951 film Detective Story in which Kirk Douglas, as Detective Jim McLeod, rages at his wife Mary after finding out she has had an abortion: “I’d give my soul to take out my brain, hold it under the faucet and wash away the dirty pictures you put there.” Played by Eleanor Parker, Mary doesn’t wilt one bit, something surprising and heartening given the year. She fires back: “But when you wash away what I may have put there, you’ll find a rotten spot in your brain, Jim. And it’s growing. I know, I’ve watched it.”
What reminded me of the scene, for no discernible much less rational reason, was reading this sentence: “Not long ago I diagnosed myself with the recently identified condition of sidewalk rage.” The triggering word must have been “rage,” which in this context is “violent and uncontrolled anger often accompanied with raving.” Rage seems to be the signature emotion these days. If we could harness it somehow as an energy source, say construct a wratherator [electric turbine powered by fury], our power needs would be met cheaply, at least in the physical sense, and our global warming fears would evaporate.
Sidewalk rage is a new one, though. Better known as “Pedestrian Aggressiveness Syndrome,” the level of which is measured by the psychologist-developed “Pedestrian Aggressiveness Syndrome Scale,” it is characterized by thoughts such as this one described by Chelsea Wald in “Why Your Brain Hates Slowpokes“: “I have to stop going places with her if I ever want to…get there!”
Now that I know of PAS, I find it embarrassingly familiar. We live in a tourist town. When we go out walking, we usually have a destination in mind and a time we need to get there. Tourists, on the other hand, usually proceed at gawking speed and just as usually spread out just far enough to block the entire sidewalk, making it difficult to pass if not impossible until we, too, are gawkling along. In my case, it can be especially frustrating since my muscles still want to drive forward at the basic-training-ingrained “double time” pace that was the norm at Fort Leonard Wood.
But wait, it gets worse. Wald points out that slowness in any respect gets on our nerves and elevates our danders. She tells us that “slow things drive us crazy because the fast pace of society has warped our timing.” We have, it seems, an internal stopwatch. “Impatience,” Wald asserts, “made sure we didn’t die from spending too long on a single unrewarding activity. It gave us the impulse to act.”
The speed of, well, everything these days “has thrown our internal timer out of balance. It creates expectations that can’t be rewarded fast enough — or rewarded at all.” This expectation of quickness has percolated down into our pedestrination [the act of pedestrinating, okay, walking]. Wald notes a 1990s study of foot speeds that found the average time to cover sixty feet in Vienna was fourteen seconds but twelve in New York City. Another study found that worldwide walking speeds increased ten percent in the 2000s.
Long story (it’s taking too long to read this, right?) shorter, having our speed expectations stymied, even when just out for a stroll, can “put us in a constant state of rage and impulsiveness.” One suggestion to circumvent sidewalk anger, and other types as well I suppose, is to practice meditation and mindfulness. “People who meditate ‘make friends with uncomfortable space.’” What the heck. This was advice from a professional, so I tried meditating while walking down Duval Street and almost immediately became intimately acquainted with a parking meter in a way that was much more uncomfortable than any senior meditation teacher might imagine. I have to admit, however, that the sudden, intense pain instantly erased any feelings of rage and impulsiveness I had from getting nowhere fast.
We may have stumbled on something earthshaking here: using pain to combat rage. One might, for instance, look for a parking meter to crash into whenever anger consumes one. But let’s rule that one out, shall we? One, because there might not be a meter within useful proximity and two, because one could hurt oneself grievously. Better to adopt something like the Rubber Band Technique. Simply wear one on your wrist when stepping out and snap yourself sharply whenever you find yourself “acting in a hostile manner (staring, presenting a mean face, moving closer or faster than expected)” and “enjoying thoughts of violence.” The bonus is that this technique works well for other things, too — like when you start to feel blue, when you decide that fork needs to be washed three hundred times, when you convince yourself that a box of Twinkies is “wafer thin,” or when you find yourself beginning to believe the news really is fake. Make sure you find a band that hangs loosely around your wrist but has enough stretch to deliver the needed therapeutic thwack. As the saying goes, the sting’s the thing. And if you don’t believe me, read the Seven Principles of Huna and then order the snap band that best suits you. I’m getting the Huna Variety Pack just to make sure all my rage and impulsiveness bases are covered.
