Deep Thoughts from Traffic School

Yes, I’ve been a bad girl. I made an illegal U-Turn in buisness neighborhood and had to spend 5 hours in online traffic school. As Dr. Richard Carlson noted, how many U-Turns do you have to do in the sake of “saving time” to justify 5-8 hours in traffic school? (Not to mention the time working to pay off the fine).

However, I learned some cool things and thought I’d share a couple:

What causes aggressive driving behavior? Health professionals generally attribute it to:
1) Increasing congestion on the roads.
2) Increasingly fast-paced lives (e.g., dual-income families).
3) Longer commutes.
4) Day-to-day stresses.

Wow! Yet another argument for the hunter-gatherer lifestyle (no congestion, ample leisure time, no such thing as a commute, no day-to-day stresses!)

Automobile collisions are the leading cause of death for people between the ages of one and twenty-nine.

Concentration Tricks:
“The mind will reel from one thing that interests it, to another that is suddenly more interesting. It must be disciplined to stay with what is important, not to what is suddenly shinier and brighter.”

“Good drivers know that concentration often flees from efforts to evoke it. They know it prefers to be attracted, rather than forced to the task, and so they find something different in the habitualness of driving that draws interest to keep them involved in the process of driving. “

“Another useful exercise is to train your attention to flick back and forth quickly from one focus to another. Do not let it stick to one thing, no matter how interesting it might be. “

Who would have guessed traffic school would teach you about meditation? (Only in California!)

I passed with a 92% and now I can move on with my less-aggressive life.