Cause and effect.

I shove my pencil off my desk. It falls to the ground.

I have a sip of water. I no longer feel thirsty.

A pedestrian cuts me off. I get angry.

Not so fast.

Sure, having someone walk in front of our car is usually enough to get our blood boiling, but what if that someone was a child running after a ball? Or a blind woman in a wheelchair?

We’ll still likely react emotionally, but not in the same way we would if it were a teenager who cut off and stared us down while walking across the street.

We’d likely be worried and frustrated for being put in a difficult position, but it’s hard to imagine that we’d really be mad at the child or the blind woman. The teenager is a different story though. He made a deliberate effort to walk in front of us, fully aware of the situation, and chose to rub it in our face. Rage is almost certainly the outcome of that interaction.

So what is it about the situations that is different? In each case, an individual wrongly made their way into the street, put us at risk of seriously harming them with our vehicle, and caused us to stop.

The difference is in the story we tell ourselves.

We tell ourselves that the teenager made a malicious move just to push our buttons, but that the child and the blind woman didn’t know any better. They made a poor choice, but we assume their heart was in the right place, so we forgive them.

This type of situation occurs everyday. We get an email, and we get angry because we tell ourselves that the sender meant to hurt us with their note (not that they had simply selected their words poorly). We walk by a coworker who doesn’t look at us, and we assume they’re mad at us (not that they’re in a hurry or pre-occupied with another thought).

We make a judgement about the situation, and that determines how we respond.

That, as Epictetus has stated, is exactly where our power lies, “It’s not what happens to you, but how you react that matters.”

When someone cuts us off, we get to choose what we believe about the situation. We get to determine whether we want to assume the worst intent, or if we want to give them the benefit of the doubt.

-Brandon