What are your yellow lights?

I’m sure you’ve stopped at a traffic light before, either as a passenger or as a driver.

We all know green means “go” and red means “stop”. As a society (and maybe even as a world) we have even carried these colors over into other areas of our lives, designating times when people should “go” with green, and times when people should stop doing something with red. I would even go so far as to say that the color red is pretty universally known as the color for “no”.

The color yellow is a bit more nebulous, however, especially in terms of traffic lights. Historically, the point of a yellow traffic light is to warn people that a red light is coming, and the design of the whole system is that when you see a yellow light, you slow down. As society has evolved, however, and more and more cars have come to populate the roads, the yellow traffic light has become less about slowing down in anticipation for the red light, and more about making a split-second decision: “Do I have enough time to make it through the light, or do I slow down?” Typically, if you’re very close to the line (and in order to stop you would have to slam on your brakes, potentially causing an accident), you continue driving to make it through the light before it turns red.

What has happened, however, is in more cases than not (I would imagine), people are now seeing the yellow light and speeding up. In other words, yellow does not mean “slow down”, or even “I have enough time to keep going at this speed”, but rather “go faster”.

I won’t lie: I’m guilty of it sometimes, too.

This has been quite an interesting evolution, as on more than one occasion I have felt pressure and a feeling of momentary panic set in upon seeing a yellow light while driving to make that decision, and feel that if I did decide to slow down, I would receive some kind of castigation from the driver behind me. Kind of a “How dare you slow down at the yellow light? Didn’t you see that we BOTH would have had time to make it through?” As if I need to be worried about the driver behind me. Sigh.

Anyway, back to the point: what I have taken for granted for most of my life as something that I know and understand has been completely upended by people just kind of doing what they want, and now a new truth has emerged: yellow no longer really means just “slow down”. Yellow means whatever the hell people want it to mean.

Of course that got me thinking…and here is what I came up with to help me embrace that instead of getting angry about it:

Yellow to me, now, means let go of what was, and embrace what is, even if I don’t agree with it or understand it.

Things in my life that I had understood or assumed to be one way for so long have changed and shifted, and I’m learning a new way of looking at them. I’m figuring out that old beliefs, while once totally sensible, are now obsolete, and letting go of them has been simultaneously challenging and rewarding.

I’m learning that assuming that something is true everywhere because it has always been true in one place…is not true.

That just because I am standing in front of the room does not mean that I am automatically in charge of the room.

That my expertise on suburban, middle-class teenagers does not equal expertise on all teenagers.

I used to say, “I take kids overseas every year”, and say it as if every single thing that came across my lap would be easy compared to that.

And you know what I found out?

That being able to get twenty-five teenagers to another country and home safely from that country while spending 8-10 days there exploring does not mean that I am able to get a child that comes from poverty, a broken home, and malnutrition to want to stop physically assaulting another child for “looking at him the wrong way”.

And, conversely, that because I thought one time that I couldn’t do something doesn’t mean that I still can’t. In fact, more likely is that it means I wasn’t ready to do it.

I look at so many things in my life and see them for the yellow lights that they are. How many things I have held onto as “the” truth, when in reality they are just “a” truth, unrelated to anything else in my life, and, more importantly, so able to be reimagined and reconsidered.

Awesome.

I’m lovin’ this journey.