Creativedot

People complain about "road rage" but I find that ironic. Traffic comes and goes on a road, but the road remains empty. I dis-identify from the traffic and focus on the empty road.
If I'm driving myself and in solitude, I love all the time I spend alone in the car, just driving. I test myself to see how I may use that time creatively, meditatively, and in "generating" silence and calm in so much noise and chaos.

So my first game is to drive with the minimum and almost nil use of the car horn. At light-stops with long durations, I switch off the car-engine. I seldom tune-in to all those noisy, chatty, and neurotically blabbering radio stations and choose soft, soothing, calm music to play in the car. Sometimes I don't even play that, and just enjoy the relative silence in the car.
Finally, all creative work is born from contemplation, absorption, experience, and observation. Am startled at how many creative ideas have struck me while driving and making myself receptive to creative ideas. Sometimes, I like to keep my camera handy, just to click photos of scenes and objects that captivate me with their beauty or charm.
On some projects, commuting eats into a significant amount of my time. In moments like these, I prefer to hire a taxi, or arrange for a driver, so I may sit in peace with a laptop which is enabled with roaming internet access, and catch up with my work. At other times, I study the traffic patterns, then start early or a little later, just to avoid peak traffic moments. I then use the time-in-hand to work or to lounge-and-work at a coffeeshop, or just use the time to chill and space-out.
There's no perfect solution to saving time spent in traffic jams or commute, except not to commute at all. The beauty of life is to find how you can transform moments of commute and traffic-jams to moments of contemplation, creativity, and even meditation.
Did I say meditation? Okay, so here's a meditation-technique for traffic-jams I could share with you. When traffic-jams bring you to a complete halt, when no one moves an inch, yet horns blare and tempers flare around me, I tend to gaze up to the splendour of the sky. The clouds are not the sky. The sky is not a 'blue roof' high above our heads. This is a false ceiling. When my eyes gaze up, there is no end to the view. The sky is infinite. The view of the space reaches out from my car all the way into the further reaches of outer space, far beyond the atmosphere. Our eyes look at infinity. Yet we are finite. The perfect thing to gaze at is the infinity of the sky, when everbody's jostling for the last inch of space around you on a congested road.