Traffic lights

The other day my Dad and I were driving home, and I realised just how incredible traffic lights are. It seems strange to write about something so mundane, which also causes a lot of frustration and impatience, but those red-yellow-green blinking lights are the product of such strategy and ingenuity.

I realised you would have to design time schemes and permutations of when this would flash and that would change and you would have to know intricately the rough time needed for a person to walk across a street and how would you decide if you wanted to take one person's walking speed over another? and you would have to know whether this light and this light could flash simultaneously or if people could go straight and right at the same time and what that would mean for the traffic light down the street.

In Spain the pedestrian crossing light would last AGES, enough for a school group of close to 60 choir girls to walk across a wide road safely, whereas in Singapore sometimes I find myself quickening my step to make it before the green man reaches 0 (and I walk fast already).

My Dad says that at certain traffic lights they have sensors below the ground, to know when a car comes, to maximise the efficiency of which light is green. (Which explains why lights took forever to change when I was on my bicycle)

And then I realised that God is really like a master traffic light coordinator in our lives. He is the master strategist, the person who knows best how fast or slow we can go, who may sometimes make things a little tough for us so we pick up the pace, but never so much that we are left stranded in the middle of life with no recourse. He is the one who may make us wait a few extra minutes, because we are not ready enough to cross, or because he wants us to stay with someone, something.

And all the time we just drive through life, oblivious to the Godly undercurrents beneath our feet.

(Also, a really cool fact about traffic lights: "In an attempt to determine a solution to the traffic problems of Tokyo, researchers from Hokkaido University set up a mold-friendly map of the area with morsels of food representing other cities, lights as obstacles, and slime mold as the roadways. They then placed slime mold where Tokyo is located on their map and watched as it spread out to reach food sources and avoid the lights. The resulting pattern was very similar to railways and roadways around Tokyo. As the mold matured, it began optimizing itself to reach the food sources most efficiently while eliminating parts of itself that weren’t as optimal, making researchers suspect that studying the patterns of slime mold might reveal something about how to make current traffic patterns and roadways more efficient." )