Tag Archives: traffic bottlenecks

Close The Gate

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Posted by on in Assistance, collaborating, Community, Family, impediments, Inspiration, Personal Values, Service Activities, Social, Striving

July 4, 2023- No, not THAT gate! Anyone familiar with ranch culture would tell you that the phrase is one of the first instructions given a child growing up, and is expected of family members and visitors alike, when going out of the portal that keeps livestock confined. It is a generalized ethic, that calls for each member of the ranch community to keep all others in mind, in everything one does.

Baha’u’llah admonishes us to “Be fair to yourself and others.” This teaching applies to all situations, and is, when you think about it, a prerequisite to a peaceful world. Even one’s sworn enemy deserves to be treated with dignity and have good qualities acknowledged.

So, courtesy and fair treatment start with our dealings with family, then with neighbours, community members, in the work place and on up the chain to state, nation and the world as a whole. Nowhere is this more critical, and often overlooked, than when engaging with traffic.

At the conclusion of a most well-orchestrated fireworks display, this evening in Prescott Valley, there was a potentially unwieldy amount of traffic that had to be moved along. We have a deeply ingrained “four-way stop” mentality here, so there was a smooth egress system that kept things moving, albeit slowly, with people alternating exiting, even when there was a five-way reality, as each lane was honoured in its turn.

“Close the gate”-just not in the neighbour’s face!

The Flow, and Going With It

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Posted by on in children, collaborating, Community, impediments, Matters of Faith, Personal goals, Personal Values, Social, Spiritual, Striving, Travel

June 16, 2022, Mishawaka, IN- Someone just asked me, “Where the heck is Mishawaka?” It’s one of the “Tri-Cities” of north central Indiana, of which South Bend is the best known and Elkhart is the third member. Michigan City is not that far to the west, and the farming town of Goshen, a bit southeast of the Tri-Cities, could be a fifth member.

I’m here because a couple has graciously had me as an overnight guest, for four of the past five years, when the time for a journey to my home area, or somewhere else back east, has come. V and S, as I will call them, have been online friends and correspondents for many years. My visit here follows a general flow of getting settled, dinner, an evening walk and conversation in the living room. The topics range from the clothes shopping we endured, as children and teens, to the idiosyncrasies of HOA Boards.

Earlier in the day, I spent about ninety minutes at the Baha’i House of Worship, in Wilmette, IL., north of Chicago. The flow of spiritual thought and energy took the form of prayer and supplication for a variety of people and processes, from world peace, and the progress of our local communities, to the progress of the souls of a fellow Baha’i and of a childhood friend, both of whom passed on this week.

Then came lunch time, and the short drive to Wilmette’s village center was tempered by the understanding that the community’s children were everywhere, on bikes. I drive cautiously, especially in residential areas, so this feature was delightful, not a nuisance-as some would have it. The energy and presence of mind brought by large groups of kids, gathered at the movie theater, and various other parts of the center, is something I have missed, over the past two decades, with so much concern over safety-as valid as that is.

The flow of traffic, along trusty old I-94, has its reliable bottlenecks: The Madison Squeeze, as I call it, from the Madison Street offramps to the I-290 intersections near the Chicago Loop; and the area from Chicago Heights and Harvey to the I-80/90 intersection, near Gary. There is not much that can be done about the former, but the latter does have “an out”: U.S. 6 to IN 19 and back onto I-94, past the aforementioned bottleneck. It saved me twenty minutes, even with the stoplights on U.S. 6 and the mildly annoying young man who zipped in front of me, intending to make a left turn, where there was none, and zipped back out into the inside lane, where, thankfully, there was no other vehicle going about normal business.

The rest of the drive to Mishawaka flowed quite nicely, thank you.