I find my peace in learning that I am not special. I am pretty much the same as everyone else. We all want the same things underneath it all: to be free from fear and from pain. To have our families be well. To be fed, to be housed, to be loved and to love.

In trying to give up my need to stand out and to be important, I find a deep source of compassion and humor. It is when I know how things “should be” that I get into trouble. I have to let them be what they are.

What a ridiculous life! We all fart and poop and show inappropriate body parts by accident and slip and fall and it is ok. It’s ok. We laugh and love and go on.

That’s all for now.

I think that just having a safe place to go talk is what is responsible for the real life changes our group members experience. Just knowing that I can lay out the worst parts of me and have other people say “Oh, yeah, I do that, too,” like it is no big deal - that is healing to my soul.

One of the subjects that comes up ALL the time for us is driving. Otherwise sane people seem to have a great deal of difficulty driving without resentment, aggression and hatred.

I have a theory: most of our lives are spent in either public places or in private places. In public, we have one code of behavior. We expect a certain amount of interaction with other people and have subtle unspoken rules to make it happen smoothly. We have to face people and to make eye contact.

At home, we have an expectation that we can have our stuff the way we want it and that no one will barge in and mess with it (unless they are our housemates or family members - and that is a whole subject for a different time). We know how things “ought to be” and we work to keep them that way - whether our perfect picture includes dust-free baseboards or the freedom to leave empty pizza boxes untouched for a week.

But our cars are our little private spaces we take out into the world, and a whole clash happens. Our cars act like our larger bodies and serve as our surrogates as we whiz around at 70 mph. So a threat to our car feels like, and often is, a threat to our physical selves. It is the place where we experience how all of our ideas of how things “ought to be” as they clash with others’ notions.

On the road, we often find ourselves behaving in ways that we never would anywhere else. Insulated from real face-to-face contact, we can act like internet trolls, acting badly and then zipping off, never to see the offended party again.

We say “Drive Carefully” but I want to make a bumper sticker that says “Drive Like You Care.” Like the person in the next car is your daughter, your father, your friend. They might be. I know someone who honked at and flipped off a confused old lady who had cut him off - and then found out that it was his mother. He has never, ever lived that one down.

We often talked about how people lose their minds on airplanes. Whether they are afraid of flying, nervous about who they are meeting, sad about leaving, or whatever the stressor may be, people behave in ways on airplanes that they would never do in ordinary life.

 Dana was the recipient of their anger and stress. She was only 21 at the time, a beautiful girl with a radiant smile - she was often mistaken for Keri Russell in “Felicity.” But she didn’t let it get to her. The only time I ever saw her cry about work was because of management, not because of her customers.

 In fact, her company received letters almost weekly telling them what a good job she was doing. One said “Dana is the most wonderful flight attendant I have ever met.”

I asked her how she did it, how she kept her cool in the face of people abusing her all day long.

“I look back and I imagine them all as cranky 2-year-olds,” she said. “I just see them as tired and upset and needing something to make them happy.”

I love that. Now when I see people acting like idiots, I try to remember that they are just acting like their inner toddler. They are lost and out of control in a big, bewildering world where they can’t get what they want and they are acting out.

Hey, it’s worth a try, right?

 Every moment of every day, we are teaching those we encounter and ourselves what we believe about the world. We are also teaching the world how to treat us.

My friend Ken eats a lot of burritos, almost one a day.

“You really love those burritos,” I commented.

“Well, yes, but there is something else,” he explained. “There is this woman at Johnnie’s, this older grandma-type lady, who has the sweetest, most soulful smile I have ever seen. Whenever I go there, she gives me one of those smiles and I feel so good.”

Who woulda thunk it? A burrito lady that changes people’s day, just by her smile. It just looks like she is making burritos. What she is really doing is teaching her customers that they are valuable, appreciated human beings. She is also teaching the world that she has plenty of love and that she knows love is to be shared.

What do you want to teach?