Making The Best Of Things

Or maybe making something out of nothing.

The drive to my girlfriend's house at night is getting pretty automatic. Same roads. Sometimes flooded, most times not. Other drivers sometimes doing dumb stuff. My mind wandering into tracking them down and pummelling them... as a public service. A routine. Twenty minutes of my day that I have been enduring, a get it over with time. That's not how I choose to burn my limited lifespan, even in small twenty minute blocks.

Last night there was a guy with his lights off. 47th Street. A well lit, busy road, where you could easily not notice your lights being off. I flashed my brights. He got the message and turned them on. Or maybe he was reaching for the lightswitch and never even saw me. Who knows?

And who knows? Someone might have been arriving at the very next intersection to pull out in front of his darkened car. Me being there to flash my lights at him may have saved his life, or saved him from a lifetime of guilt for killing someone that never saw him coming. Long odds. The high probability is that he would have noticed anyway. But since there is no way of knowing, really, I get to consider my twenty minutes well spent.

So tonight's drive will be twenty minutes lived, not just gotten over with.