I was driving the other day when another driver gave me the look.
You know the look—the one that suggests you have personally failed at driving, at life, and at the human condition.
It is an extraordinary expression of certainty between strangers.
Because we are both sitting in giant metal boxes hurtling through space at 45 miles an hour, and somehow one or both of us decided to become the moral authority of lane changes.
And I found myself wondering: why do we do this to each other?
What is happening in the mind of someone who looks at another person and thinks, even briefly, yes, you are the problem here?
In that moment, I felt the familiar, self-righteous reflex to hand that judgement right back.
But then something happened.
I Don’t Know Her Story
I realized the only thing I knew about that person was that at some point, she was a child. Once upon a time, someone held her as a baby and probably hoped she would have a good life. Besides that, I knew nothing of her.
Not where she was going. Not where she had been. Not what had happened in the minutes, days, or years before this moment.
She could have been having the worst week of her life. She could have been caring for someone sick. She might have been carrying grief, financial worries, heartbreak, or something private and unresolved.
All of it invisible. All of it compressed into a single moment on the road.
And I was simply the nearest surface it landed on.
The more I think about it, the more I notice how often we mistake fragments for whole stories. A moment becomes a verdict.
But I find that people’s sharp edges are not cruelty. Those edges are more likely pressure without release.
And pressure leaks. It spills. It lands on whoever is nearby. Traffic makes this especially visible.
What is driving if not controlled chaos with mutual agreement? Tiny corrections. Constant uncertainty. Shared restraint.
Sound familiar? A little like living in this wild, wild world?
And each car contains an entire secret world. Someone grieving. Someone in love. Someone terrified. Someone celebrating. Someone falling apart quietly behind tinted glass. Someone brainstorming novelties that will grant them exciting adventures.
We are each behind the wheel of our lives, briefly meeting one another at shared intersections. When I view humanity from this perspective, I am humbled and deeply grateful to be included in this miraculous fabric of Life in Motion.
My life unfolds in cinema and chapter books. It feels vast and meaningful from the inside. So does everyone else’s. Parallel lives, shared world.
Compassion is a barometer for accuracy.
The truth of it all is this:
Whatever I see in someone else, I can find in myself under another context, in a different form.
If I look hard enough.
This is where compassion becomes less of a virtue and more of a barometer for accuracy. Compassion reminds us that we rarely know enough to justify the certainty of our assumptions.
Compassion is what naturally emerges when I realize I have little to no information about someone.
Perhaps humility is what precedes compassion.
When I pay attention to my own experience, the process often looks something like this:
Defensive reaction
↓
Judgment
↓
Perspective shift
↓
Humility
↓
Compassion
↓
Gratitude
Not every time, and not perfectly. But often enough that I have begun to trust the pattern.
And yes, gratitude. When compassion has room to enter the moment, in the right light, it transforms into gratitude.
Gratitude that their existence, however briefly, acknowledged my own.
Gratitude for being included in this strange network of intersecting worlds.
Gratitude that, for a fleeting moment, I got to play a character in someone else’s story, even if as the villain.
The absurdity makes me giggle. It is just absolutely delightful.
Take the scenic route home.
So now when I am given the look (or the finger), I try not to complete the story too quickly. I try to remember that what I am seeing is merely a sentence of a story parallel to my own, a story that I cannot fully access.
The only story we have full access to is our own.
We will never be able to see the world behind someone else’s eyes. We can only imagine how someone else experiences the color red. Or how they hear their own voice. And that power of imagination should be enough.
Because honestly?
We are all human being human. Humans becoming more into the shape of our Selves.
Has anyone alive finished becoming? Has anyone truly arrived?
Is there not more than one destination in our journeys? Are we all not taking the scenic route to get to where we are wanting to go?
Because at the end of the day, we are all just trying to get home.
Footsteps in Fugue 
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