The Next Time Someone Steals Your Parking Spot ... (a parable)

I first heard of this parable in the book "The Cow in the Parking Lot: A Zen Approach to Overcoming Anger". It goes something like this (paraphrasing and modified slightly). To read the actual parable, you can find in within the first few pages of the book.

You are looking for a parking spot in a mall. It is the height of Christmas season, so spots are a valuable commodity and hard to find. But finally you see a car with backup lights on and you signal your claim to the spot. After the car backs out, someone else zoom right into your space.

You honk to let him know that you got there first. But he didn't care and just smirked as he got out of his car. He didn't even have the look of "Oh, was that spot your's? I'm not sure who got here first." He had the look of "Ha ha. I got it before you. Tough luck buddy." Are you angry? Many would be.

Now consider a similar situation where after the car backs out, a cow wanders into the spot and sat in it. (The mall is at the edge of town in a rural area; so cows do roam about.) Are you angry now? Many would not be.

Why do we get angry in the first case and not the second?

In both cases, the outcome is the same: you have to look for another spot.

The authors of the book says that we become angry due to unmet demands. In this case, the unmet demand is that people respect us and not steal our spot. This demand was not met and we get angry.

In the case of the cow, we do not have such demands that cows respect us. Since cows don't have such intelligent brains and do not know the concept of respect. So we do not get angry.

Sometimes just pausing to think about "why" we get angry is all it takes for the anger to diffuse.

It is in the nature of the cow to not understand the concept of respect. Therefore, we let it be. What we forget is the it is also in the nature of the world to have a certain percentage of jerks in it. Therefore if a jerk steals our parking spot, we let it be. Like the cow, the person doesn't know any better.

That is not to say that we suppress our anger. Anger is an emotion. Violence is an action. You can continue to feel the emotion. But you do not have to express that feeling in the form of violence (such as removing the air from his tires, writing a nasty note, etc).

The best thing to do is to transform our anger. It will diffuse on its own. The article "Diffusing Anger" in the October 2002 issue of Michigan Bar Journal says ...

"The first stage involves cognitive restructuring to abate the ascending rage and prevent a destructive reaction."

You do this by applying an "extinguishing thought". This could be to realized that there will always be people who will steal our parking spots and there is no changing it. Consider further whether our demands are realistic. Is it realistic to expect every person in the world to respect us and not steal things? Perhaps not. 

Still angry?   Then consider if our unmet demand is really that important.  Is it really that important we get that exact spot?  Could we not just look for another spot?

Another way could be to use a reframing technique described in the Hub Dissipating Anger By Reframing.

By the time you finish with all these thought exercises and by the time you finish answering all these questions, you might have forgotten about the incident by now.

So the moral of the story is ...

When someone steals our parking spot, imagine it was a cow that had taken it.