You’re driving toward an intersection and the light changes from green to yellow. You’re too far away to make it through before it turns red. What do you do?
You slow to a stop, of course. Through your actions, you accept your fate.
But do you mentally accept it? Or do you get upset that you missed the light?
I hope you accept it because getting upset doesn’t help. It just makes you suffer.
A red light isn’t mean or unfair. It just is. And it’s outside of your control, so the only logical thing to do is accept it.
This, of course, isn’t really about traffic lights. Here’s how Ryan Holiday puts it in The Obstacle is the Way:
“If someone we knew took traffic lights personally, we would judge them insane.
Yet this is exactly what life is doing to us. It tells us to come to a stop here. Or that some intersection is blocked or that a particular road has been rerouted through an inconvenient detour. We can’t argue or yell this problem away. We simply accept it.
That is not to say we allow it to prevent us from reaching our ultimate destination. But it does change the way we travel to get there and the duration of the trip.”1
Life’s red lights always come as a surprise. A broken water heater. An injury. A stock market crash. A cancer diagnosis. But we shouldn’t actually be surprised by such things. Live long enough, and you’ll experience them all.
And yes, sometimes the obstacles life puts in our way are unfair. But while we should fight injustice and work to make the world a better place, we must also accept that things will never be perfect.
Sometimes, the light is just red.
1 Holiday, Ryan. The Obstacle Is The Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph. Portfolio/Penguin, 2014.