The other day I was walking on the side walk of a big roundabout that connects many roads. From where I enter the roundabout I have two pedestrian crossing with stripes and 4 streets leading to residential areas (the top of the image). The weather conditions were drizzling rain and winter morning darkness. Add to this list me wearing dark clothes, a sleepy driver that is driving a car with damp windows and you get the ideal situation to be hit by a car.
That morning I managed to cross the pedestrian crossings without troubles as the cars slowed down to give me way. At the third street a car hurried towards the roundabout and presumably looked to the left to see if any traffic was arriving and not paying attention to the walking person on the side walk trying to guess whether the car was going to stop or not. The car did not stop. It even turned right much more than I expected and actually was necessary and I had to jump away to prevent the car running over my toes. As a reaction to this awkward situation I slammed the back of the car as a kind of warning or a desperate attempt to have my presence noted.
Whether the driver noticed or not, he drove on, maybe fully unaware of what happened and not even noticing the noise of my had hitting the car. Who knows. Anyway, this experience caused my adrenaline levels to raise and my mind started spinning, spitting out all kind of scenarios of what could have happened if I had been run over by the car.
I was imagining how the car would have hit me and how I grabbed the door handle and started shouting and screaming in an attempt to have the driver stop the car. While doing so I felt the adrenaline rush reaching a boiling point. I continued working out the scenarios with me calling for an ambulance and being brought to a hospital, me being pissed off by the fact the driver was not traceable while I was the victim and limited by my injuries.
Then I realized what I had been doing and took a couple of deep breaths, stopped my thoughts, identified what happened in my mind and what had been the trigger and started doing self-forgiveness on the fact that I allowed myself to have fed my emotions with thoughts instead of real facts. I identified that the main thought or maybe frustrations or fear was the scenario to be injured by someone that potentially would not even have noticed what he caused, or worse, purposely drove off and denying responsibility. The thought this might have happened made me angry.
In other words, just the thought of an event that never took place, created by my own imagination made me angry. Quite scary. I am able to get angry just because I am imagining something might happen I am scared about without it actually happening in reality. Mind blowing! But it happens all the time!
This was not the first time I experienced a situation like this one and not the first time I allowed myself to create imaginary situations to feed my emotions like anger and see myself pushed into the role of a victim, ready to blame the others that I saw as the cause of all my troubles. But after this time, where I decided to observe closely my reactions, I decided to apply a change.
So, when the very next day a car was stopping just in time at the pedestrian crossing, I was already jumping away as I expected the car to go on, I took a deep breath and just evaluated the situation: I had been careful and defensive, nothing happened and the situation had not been really dangerous. I wrapped up the situation like this and continued walking while listening to a Eqafe recording.