It's so easy to allow our emotions to get the better of us. We tend to put ourselves at the center of all of the activity around us whether we are involved or not. We respond to traffic as if it was a personal affront (at least I do); we participate in some vast process that started before we entered and will continue after we are gone, but still we somehow take responsibility for anything that goes wrong; we encounter people we don't know, and will likely never meet again, but we give them huge pieces of our time and energy. Stop it! Again, this isn't about you. We need to learn to see the reality of situations. As Marcus Aurelius said:
Begin the morning by saying to thyself, I shall meet with the busy-body, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial. All these things happen to them by reason of their ignorance of what is good and evil. But I who have seen the nature of the good that it is beautiful, and of the bad that it is ugly, and the nature of him who does wrong, that it is akin to me, not only of the same blood or seed, but that it participates in the same intelligence and the same portion of the divinity, I can neither be injured by any of them, for no one can fix on me what is ugly, nor can I be angry with my kinsman, nor hate him, For we are made for co-operation, like feet, like hands, like eyelids, like the rows of the upper and lower teeth. To act against one another then is contrary to nature; and it is acting against one another to be vexed and to turn away.
Marcus Aurelius
Meditations
Indeed. We need to accept that the world is full of perceived obstacles, but they only become so as far as we allow them. To achieve the freedom I want via the study of Stoicism, I have to see the truth of the fact that it's not about me, I am not in the thoughts of others, but am only a victim of their actions as long as I allow myself to be so.
