Who’da Thought

23Jul08

Today I had Defensive Driving…(wohoo for me). But it was a dramatic life altering experience for me. Ironically, the lesson had nothing to do with seat belts and drunk driving and blind spots (although we did watch THE tape for like 30 minutes out of the whole 4 hour session).

A lot of times we focus on the things in life that are self centered, and trapped into OUR OWN little bubble called life that we never realize the smaller things that actually can cause a revelation.

So we’re all sitting in class today and the teacher is trying his hardest to make us laugh, because, mind you this is suppose to be a “funny” defensive driving course, and it really wasn’t working. I believe I was the only one forcing myself to laugh at his corny jokes. The black guy behind me was more hilarious than the teacher because he was trying to contribute his own jokes and the only person who understood what he was trying to say was me. It’s obvious none of us wanted to be there, I mean it’s Defensive Driving for God sake. After a awhile, we all began to warm up and talk to one another, share stories and laugh with one another and that is when the learning process began, so here is the gist of what I learned.

1: One of the most important lessons I learned is that diversity is a good thing. I have always been an advocate of diversity but sometimes it just isn’t safe because you never know how people are raising their kids now-a-day. So here we all are, Black, White, and Hispanic; male and female; ages 21- 51 (me being the youngest of course); working class and students. We all share a common interest that we violated the law.

2: Life is about choices and we all made a choice to go over the speed limit, run a stop sign etc. The most important thing to understand about choices is that we make good choices in our life and we make bad choices. When we make bad choices we must be able to learn from it, understand why it was a bad choice and not continue to make the same bad choice. The same applies to good choices; we must understand why it was a good choice for the fitting situation and come to the realization of the outcome of the decision and distinguish rather it was really beneficial for the long run or just that moment.

3: We can not be judgmental of others. I am very guilty of this because I will definitely point the finger at people but I can say that when I screw up I own up to my mistakes and I don’t beg for forgiveness. But it is still important to understand that we all make good and bad decisions and that we can not be condescending of those who make bad decisions in situations where we necessarily make good ones. For whatever reason they were not in their right mind or did not have the opportunity to think their situation through. One of the examples that the instructor gave us was about a very popular campaign of a girls who face and body is permanently disfigured because she was trapped inside a car when a drunk driver hit her. The drunk driver was a 19 year old headed to college and was a great athlete. He did not have the intention of killing the people in the car or destroying the girls life but we point the finger and blame him and call him a horrible person. But the same applies when we run a stop sign and cause a accident or apply makeup and eating, we are still capable of taking someone’s life behind the wheel when we don’t intend on it. Either way it is wrong to be careless of others while driving if you are not going to care about yourself. Therefore, we can not judge others because we are all guilty of putting others in danger behind the wheel. Furthermore, we’ve all driven over that 0.08 limit, we just haven’t got caught and that’s what separates us from the very people who did the exact same thing and are behind bars for claiming someone’s life.

Yes so class was amazing today and it definitely had an impact on my life and I absolutely thrilled about the concluding half tomorrow.

Filed under: I spit that REAL REAL   |  Leave a Comment
Tags: Insight