Rolling a stop sign is a habit busy drivers often do. Most of us are just rushing to get from work, to home, to our friends house or somewhere else in between and we don't always have time for a full complete stop. At first I thought rolling a stop sign was just breaking a law but the more I thought about it, there's something totally worse about it.
Clearly we are all just running around like crazy people trying to enjoy life. But if we are frantically trying to get from point A to B are we really enjoying ourselves? Our thought process goes something like this: if we're lacking on time to spare, we speed everything up so we can pack more into our lives. However in reality, the more we rush the more we miss out on.
Think of your drive from home to work or school. Every day it may seem like the same routine. The way the road moves is second nature to you because you drive the same route day in and day out. As we drive along we don't pay much attention to our surroundings because they don't seem to change from day to day. Life's simple rewards of looking out the window and enjoying the view are too easily forgotten. In fact, a lot of life's little wonders are taken for granted without our acknowledgement. If we took a few minutes of our drive to look around and take in the world around us, our jam packed lives would feel less crammed.
A lot of this "missing out on life" happens when we're in the car. Driving is aimless wandering until we arrive at our destination. The way the sunshine seeps through the trees and paints a beautiful shadow onto the winding country road is unnoticed when we are rushing. The beautiful sunset of red and orange rays shining through your windshield does not phase you because your mind is elsewhere. Your head is cluttered with thoughts of chores that need to get done, laundry that needs to be folded and how unbelievably exhausted you are from work. Your surroundings mean nothing to you as you are rolling through stop signs in your rush to get home. Your delirious journey from point A to point B has presented you with a life that you are just living and not enjoying.
It's time to change that. Because as you roll a stop sign or miss out on a beautiful view, you're truly hurting yourself. As busy as we may be, we need to find time for joy. As busy Americans we spend too much time sitting in traffic and not enough time sitting on our patio's. More often we need to take in the breeze moving between the trees and the stars above us. Instead of rushing from point A to point B, take a moment to look around and realize what a beautiful world we live in. It's full of opportunities and little wonders that you may miss out on the next time you roll a stop sign.