I was tooling along northbound I-5 through Seattle years ago when some dude in a sports car in the lane to my right — doing I estimate close to 95 mph — comes roaring up behind the vehicle just ahead of him.

The guy in the second vehicle was traveling at my speed, 65 mph, so the speeder had to slam on his brakes. I glanced inside his car. His face was purple with rage, and he was screaming, beating the steering wheel, hurling insults at the guy in front, questioning the marital status of his parents at the time of his birth.

What struck me at that moment was: there sits a fool, totally unaware that he himself is the cause of his own rage. The bald truth was that his fury was the consequence of his own over-the-top speeding on a busy highway, in a world that wasn’t all about accommodating him. But like so many of us do, he blamed the other guy.

I’ve been thinking about that gink in the wake of a serious tumble I took down the stairs at home about a week ago. Given the side effects of the many medicines in the chemical cocktail I take to combat the effects of chemotherapy, I’d been dizzy, dehydrated, nauseated, as sick as I’d ever been after an infusion.

I thought I could take the stairs sitting down. Seemed like a sound idea. After all, who, sitting on a step, can fall down a flight of stairs? Only a fool for the ages. Well, turns out, I was that fool.

Next thing I recall was Ann, who’d heard my fall, asking me if I was all right.

“Of course,” I said in my confusion. “I’m in bed with you.”

“No, you’re not,” said Ann. “You fell down the stairs!”

And so I had. I’d hit my head very hard on the floor, was out cold, and almost inextricably entangled in the items my arms and legs had pulled from the stairwell to retard my rapid, unplanned descent at the imperative of gravity. Took a few minutes to pry me loose from it all.

At first of course, I blamed my treatment. Simple enough. It was certainly a contributing factor.

I now believe what happened was that, as I neared the landing at the bottom of the steps, I stood up on those same steps, confident that, by that point, I was safe.

I nearly broke my neck.

What I have since figured out, however, was that I had been taking miserable care of myself, not only during my treatment but for most of my life. Eating irregularly or not at all, neglecting the body’s need for water and paying no attention to my electrolytes, all of which had nearly killed me during my initial tussle with chemotherapy in 2021.

I’d been wrong.

Later, I told my nurse about the incident. She recommended a simple procedure — a saline drip. I followed her advice. And lo and behold, when I rose from the infusion chair an hour later, I was a new person. All it took was a bit of salt.

In effect, I’d been that guy in the sports car I wrote about at the beginning of this column, completely unaware ,or unwilling to consider the consequences of his actions, but blaming extraneous factors and people. I could say I’d been in command of “my vehicle,” but I see now that that was untrue. I had lived so many years in my head that I neglected the body below. Although the mind refuses to see, our bodies will grow older and more infirm with time.

Now I’m starting to do all the healthful things I should have been doing all along. The bad habits of a lifetime are not overcome in a day or without setbacks, but I am on the road.

Let me add as I wrap this up that’s it’s not only headcases and nerds like me who fall into error and blame the world around them. Turn on the television, listen to the radio, get on the Internet. We are facing an epidemic of blame shifting.

Don’t believe me? Consider the guy who’s been fired from his job because of his own abysmal work record, or because he’d been stealing from corporate, or because he’d been an asshat on the job. He’s the guy who returns later in the day with a weapon and slaughters the people, from his former boss to his co-workers, who had “done him wrong.” It happens almost every day.

No accident or coincidence that it’s the same fault that drove Adolf Hitler and an entire culture mad, because as he and many others claimed, Jews had stabbed the German nation in the back at the close of World War I. No, Germany lost the war on its own.

It’s the same fault that convinced the 9/11 hijackers to fly those jet planes into the World Trade Center because, of course, the West was to blame for all the problems that had beset the Middle East.

It’s a weasel move by people with grow into adulthood without growing into adults.

It’s a failure to follow the imperative that should compel all of us to take a hard look in the mirror from time to time, and to acknowledge that the author of most of our besetting problems is staring back at us.

I know it can be comforting to blame everyone and everything else for the messes we make of our lives.

But if you want to be a decent human being on this planet, accepting personal responsibility is a good place to start.

Robert Whale can be reached at robert.whale@auburn-reporter.com.