Seeing Red in a Different Light
I have a strange confession to make: I love redlights. For the longest time, I thought it had everything to do with the color. Red is bold. It is strong. Red fruits are the sweetest and juiciest. Red powders spice up my food. The red of Valentine’s Day is my love and the red of Christmas Day is my spirit. And although Angry Bird is red, doesn’t every virtue need a cardinal? Red is the color of my life-giving ablood, and whatever I put my heart in by definition must be colored red. So my love of redlights is all about red, right?
Not so fast!
Let’s stop and think about this.
If I stop to think about something, I can fully contemplate it and analyze it. Why is the red in redlight more related to the red of anger than love? For most people, the topmost light on the traffic signal tops their list of annoyances encountered in a typical day. People seem to hate stoplights.
That’s it! Stoplights! In using the synonym stoplight, I think I can see where this is going. Focusing on the color red is irrelevant. The color red actually has nothing to do with this. It’s about the stop. People are annoyed with the stop.
How many minutes in a day, hours in a month, and huge chunks of time in a year are wasted thanks to that bright glowing red? According to AAA, it's 58.6 hours a year. If that was a job you’d be paid overtime. We are told to sleep 56 hours a week. Over the course of a year we just lost a week of sleep! I don’t know about you, but I am bleary-eyed just thinking about that.
That 58 hours a year is roughly an hour a week. We are told to exercise 3 hours a week. Well, we just lost one of those hours at a standstill! Over the course of a year, we lose two full calendar days plus almost half of another. There went my weekend!
The fact is, in our consumer driven everything-is-possible-now world, the green light rules. The "green light culture" conditions us to feel we always need to be going somewhere. But we are never allowed to arrive at that "somewhere" because there is no true destination, only the next thing to hurry off to. Consumer culture ensures we never get anywhere and are never content or comfortable with what we have (it is a huge part of advertising).
Being happy is achievable, but is something that is purposely and forever just out of reach. It’s all about keeping going so we don’t start thinking. Keep people moving. Don’t let them stop and think. We don’t want them to think. Just keep them as mindless consumers on the treadmill of life.
In our be everywhere do anything digitally experienced world, we feel even more pressure than ever to always be moving to the next thing: the next Twitter post, Snapchat Story, or TikTok video. We rarely take time to reflect and immerse ourselves in the present.
This is why I value redlights. Because I value reflection. I value taking time to stop. Period.
When I am at a red light, I do not have to focus on driving. When the wheels are not turning on my car the wheels are turning in my head. Turning wheels that turn gears that produce thoughts and ideas. Some of my best ideas have been at redlights. I won’t stop on my own, but that light in all its red glory forces me to stop.
When green turns to red on the road, red turns to green in my head.
I stop. The wheels stop . . . and the other wheels start.
