The Asshole and the High Ground

You know those people who take up two parking spaces in a lot by parking just over the white line, leaving no room for any reasonable vehicle? I know you know what I'm talking about. I sat next to that guy on the bus tonight.

It was the last seat on the bus, at the very back. People were already standing in the aisle. It was a sideways-facing seat, and only about 12 inches was unoccupied. While I'm nowhere in the remote vicinity of being thin, I'm not obese, and neither was the dude sitting next to those open 12 inches. My feet hurt after walking a mile in the wrong shoes and then standing to wait an extra 25 minutes for a bus that tends to run by a schedule posted in a universe parallel to the one we inhabit, so I squeezed myself into the space. Plenty of room for the rear, but the dude next to me doesn't follow bus etiquette by pulling in his arms just a little. In fact, he spreads out just a little more, resting his arms against my side when he isn't jostling me to pull his phone out of his pocket and then put it back in. Repeatedly. There's a little barrier at the end of the seat, which is the only thing keeping me upright. Sort of. The problem is, the rude dude has now opened his arms so wide I'm sitting bent sideways at the waist. I look like one of the kids dancing in that Charlie Brown holiday show, frozen in a horribly uncomfortable moment of be-bop. Ten minutes later my side starts to cramp. Traffic is crawling on the freeway. Normally, I'm fairly unflappable. I'm about to start flapping.

So, what happens next? Do I lose my cool? Scream at the dude? Shove an elbow into his kidney? Passively-aggressively squirm my way into a more comfortable position, sighing sharply and loudly? Well no, we reached a stop as I reached my tolerance limit and I was able to move into another seat. Of course, that didn't stop me from ranting to my daughter about the asshole on the bus as soon as I got home.

A few hours later my feet don't hurt and I'm warm and comfortable at home, drinking tea and eating chocolate, and reassessing that bus ride. It occurs to me I have two choices. One is to store the asshole on the bus in the "people suck" folder in my memory banks. The other is to acknowledge that some people really don't understand the concepts of boundaries, personal space and social skills, and stake out the higher ground of understanding and forgiveness. This isn't easy.

I work really, really hard to take the high road. It doesn't come naturally to me even though I intellectually accept it's a good road to travel. I know why that is and understand all the things over the years that culminated to form my reactions to these kinds of circumstances. There's no need to go into any of it here because at the end of the day I am still the master of myself and my reactions, regardless of past circumstances. I am choosing to believe the gentleman sitting next to me on the bus was truly unaware of the possibility he could be making anyone sitting next to him uncomfortable. And to be fair, I could have said something politely, but I didn't. And, maybe his brain isn't wired to be all that aware of what's going on around him. And, is 20 minutes of discomfort in a comfortable life I worked really hard to make comfortable worth dwelling on? I'm taking the high ground on this one, and frankly, I feel like I just scaled a mountain.

Silly, right? This was hardly a life-changing, earth-shattering moral dilemma. The point is, we need to stop and take the time to think about how we think. Think about how we react to the people we encounter and the circumstances that make up our days. Too many people are spending not enough time thinking, and the civil fabric of our society is fraying. Badly. Mending it starts with thinking about how we think about other people.

The moral high ground is an easy place to inhabit when you don't have to toil to get there, out of breath and out of shape. When you have to stretch some mental muscles, until the strain is almost painful, you've really accomplished something. That's high ground worth inhabiting.