Give Way
Almost nobody yields anymore. Vehicles merging from on-ramps into seventy mph traffic are not asking for permission. They are expecting to have a place. It’s not their job to wait for a spot to slide into, it’s the cars’ jobs-- the ones spaced in succession rip-roaring like a train-- to create room.
“Yield” was once a consequence-carrying law. Then somewhere along the way (as we humans hurried up to hurry) it morphed from that into a suggestion. Now, it means nothing. Right-lane drivers innately know. They are the anointed absorbers charged with having a scoot-over plan.
“What,” I wonder, “has made us so reluctant to give way?”
On my first date with my husband (after he had inadvertently clocked me in the nose with his right elbow as he backed us out of the dormitory parking lot—a story for another day), something random struck a chord. I think we went to a ballgame, though I can’t imagine why since we both played and therefore went to plenty of our own. Afterward, we stopped for CiCi’s pizza at the edge of town before heading back to campus. I have zero recollection of who was playing whom, of what either of us wore, or of what we ate or talked about, but as we prepared to walk through the parlor’s entrance, Dane put his hand on the small of my back and ushered me in. Thirty-eight years later, I remember how that felt.
His tiny action said, “You first.” Yielding, he offered right-of-way.
Giving space for something else or someone else sounds simple.
Ordinary even.
On airplanes, in elevators, at the check-out line:
“You go.”
“No, you go.”
“No, you go.” The stumbly sequence of two yielders who show up at the same time sounds quite familiar. This dance, though often awkward, is how we get along. It’s how we bypass scrapes and subsequent clashes. It’s how we get where we’re going without getting all dinged up. Yet, even though it’s simple and we’ve been witness to it playing out, it is not the norm.
Too often we bristle when we have to wait our turn.
Recently, while loitering as we tend to do at airport gates before our group is called, a woman pushed her way through the clumps of people that had pooled. When the attendant’s click of the microphone clacked to announce the first First Class boarding call, the woman lunged for the ticket scanner, as if the first to punch their pass would be handed a lottery jackpot. What ensued behind her were streams of passengers jockeying for position in a bulging, singular line.
Clearly, highway on-ramps aren’t the only place where it’s a challenge to give way.
Perhaps we put our blinders on purposely to shield others from our peripheral vision so we don’t have to decide what to do about the dilemma of them and us. We want what we want; what the other guy does or doesn’t get does not get factored in. That happens some, for sure, whether we’re on the road or at the quick stop or at the terminal gate.
Mostly, though, failure to yield is not so much an intention as it is a habit that the western world slopes us toward. “Look out for number one” gets sewn into our DNA by the wicked wind. It becomes our default mode.
That’s when accidents that shouldn’t happen happen. So much wreckage could be avoided if more of us were willing to give way.
P.S. I’m Walkin’ Here!