During a 21 Day Kindness Challenge that my wife Anar and I were a part of, she shared one day that she drove that whole day without honking her car’s horn. Her office is in an area which tends to be congested with a lot of traffic during peak hours, and honking is very much prevalent. In general, there tends to be a lot of honking on the streets of the city we live in. Being part of and having contributed to that conditioning consciously as well as unconsciously, it truly calls for a lot of mindfulness to be able to drive without honking the horn! Anar went on to do that for some more days, and reflected it was a profound experience. As she found stillness inside, it seemed that the external circumstances also calmed down and facilitated a deeper stillness inside – a virtuous cycle :)

As simple as the act itself sounded, it shifted something inside me which was so powerful that I too started doing the same from that moment onwards. It’s been about four months since, and while there have been many instances wherein I have honked, it has been a truly insightful experience. Just sharing some reflections on it:

It made me look into why I honk. The mind comes up with the logical sounding statement “duh! I do it to avoid accidents!” Staying with the question some more revealed that the action was a manifestation of the impatience, judgmental way of looking and lack of trust within me. Most of the time, it was all of the above combined. Sure, there is a time and place when one would need to honk to alert others, but such emergencies are few and far in-between than what the mind would like to believe. Being mindful, just watching, while the urge to honk came up resulted many times in its own action – which was the inaction of not honking in this case, instead being still inside.

Doing this also brought me face to face with how I look at the people around me. How I am constantly making judgements and acting from that fragmented view. And then how I am trying to ‘mitigate’ those so-called ‘risks’ that I perceive and how I want to think that I am in control, and also control the actions of others. How there is a latent aggression inside, how it gets triggered, and how it manifests. It’s a laugh many times when I am driving and something triggers this urge, and im watching it, and though I don’t actually do it but I can see myself doing it :) The visual plays out and then just disappears into thin air. That urge is no longer there, and I think to myself – that’s it? That’s all there is to it?!

It also makes me look at how I am communicating with the other drivers and pedestrians, in a non-verbal yet very obvious manner based on the length, frequency and aggressiveness of the honking! So far I had never seen it like that – as a communication that is happening. And how the energy that I transmit triggers and reflects the energies of those around me.

I resonate deeply with what Anar shared that as I became still inside, the outside became still too. There seems to be a natural rhythm and flow in the movement of the traffic and when I become one with that flow, instead of trying to out-maneuver it, things just seemed to fall into place beautifully.

Krishnamurti has said that meditation is not something apart from life, it is the choiceless awareness from moment to moment in our day to day lives. I am grateful for having stumbled upon a small first-hand experience of this. Traffic is not such a bad thing after all, is it?! :))