A Parking Space

This weekend, Josh and I took a quick hop, skip, and jump to our main street area to partake in a local shopping event where the small businesses in town were highlighted and offered some snacks and refreshments along with some discounts on their products. We should have walked, as we're a half mile at most from most of the stores, but it was raining, and my left leg hasn't been cooperating much with me lately. So I asked Josh to drive and he was happy to.

We turned off the main drag and right in front of the first shop I wanted to go to were two prime parking spots. Much to my dismay, Josh drove right past them, opting to do a loop de loop around a 2 block section of one way streets and the longest red light in town. I chuckle as I write this, because since moving to our little town, I've gotten spoiled with being able to get everywhere within 10 minutes, something pretty impossible when I was living just outside of Pittsburgh. But, I digress.

As he took the first turn I did one of those slow tilts of the head and stared at him and said "What are you doing? Why did you drive past those spots". His response, "Just let me park." But we weren't parking, we were driving, slowly. So I asked again, "But why didn't you just pull into that spot right out front? It'll probably be gone by the time we get back around to it."

And, bless my husband - who never says anything controversial - he muttered, "This is why men wreck... passenger drivers." Now, my eyes were twice as big and I stuttered and said "I know you didn't just say that. I just want to know why you didn't park in the obvious spot." And after I repeated the question a few more times, now really grating on his nerves, he finally said, "The car behind me was too close to try and parallel park ok, I just don't want to be rushed."

I still didn't agree and got one last jab of "make them drive around you then, that's what turn signals are for." At this point, we had hit the 'we can let this really disrupt our day out or we can decide to move on from it', something that we've really struggled with in the past over when little, trivial disagreements come up. But this time, we just took a moment, once we parked - not in the spots that had been available but a new one that opened up - and both took a deep breath and agreed to clean slate it. I didn't bring it up again and he let go of whatever feeling my pestering had brought about in him. We had a lovely time, enjoyed ourselves and moved past the mess of the parking space.

When we got home a little while later, we both agreed that we could have done better. In the end, I just could not put myself in his shoes in a way that I would have made the same decision, and he always has trouble understanding why I seem to be rushing to do everything. Maybe we'll always have moments like this, but the win this time, was our ability to swiftly let go of whatever we had immediately jumped to internalize during that 5 minutes of tension.

It's a great reminder that our reactions to mundane things, often reflect our own personal inability to feel comfortable with something. It's when we're unable to separate and just accept something as it is, or we fixate on what we don't understand, that we start to see fissures develop both personally and professionally.

What I would encourage, is that the question we counter ourselves with is, "What's the harm in just letting it go". In a world where there always seems to be winners and losers, what if things just 'were' - the idea of no harm, no foul. Take a beat, and if it's still something you want to address, try to at least detect why it's something you can't seem to let go of immediately. Is it about you or them? And always, inject a little grace into the situation, it'll go a long way.