See this is where arrogance works!

Perhaps it's arrogance, perhaps it's just confidence, I really don't know. However, cycling home from work the other night, winding my way through the usual chaos on the streets of the Gold Coast at that time of night, something occurred to me. I treat traffic with almost total disdain these days. Don't get the wrong idea from this statement, I don't run red lights or break the law in any way. It's just that when I'm picking my way through gridlock, even in situations where I have to make multiple lane changes to get the gaps as they appear, I seem to be able to do it instinctively.

I'm not sure where I learned this skill, perhaps it was just something taught by experience over a period of time, but I seem to have mastered it pretty well. These days I seem to have considerably fewer close calls with cars than I once did -- it used to be almost daily, but now they seem to be rare. Or perhaps that's the confidence of experience again, because I also seem to know how to react to those close calls when they do happen, and thus I rarely get flustered by them. I've no reason to believe that Gold Coast drivers have suddenly become more skilled.

There is actually a point to this story: fear of traffic is largely redundant. All fear really does is prevent an individual from performing to their ability in a given situation. By transcending the fear of traffic, I have become much more proficient at riding in traffic because I'm now free to concentrate on dealing with the traffic situation as it presents itself. I am no longer constrained by the fear of what might (but in reality probably won't) happen. Even if it does happen, my mind is free to focus on it when it does, because it's not worrying about all of the other things that didn't happen in that situation.

When I reach this stage, I discover bliss, a form of utopia almost. Cycling is now a stress free experience. Sure, there are surprises along the way, sometimes things happen that I don't expect, but with a clear mind to focus, I can usually see them early -- often spotting them well before they actually happen. This is the key to safe, stress-free cycling, the ability to focus on the task at hand exclusively. Why we're taught to be fearful of traffic I have no idea.