Escaping the grasp of anger

Sunday, April 6, 2014

I spent far too many years of my adulthood encased in a fog of situational depression. (Again, that girly expectations of adulthood versus hard, cold reality thing.) Finally, thanks to some good spiritual teaching, I began to realize the real downer of situational depression: There would always - always - be some funky situation there to feed that depression. Better to determine to stay joyful despite one’s circumstances.

I’ve come to the same conclusion when it comes to a closely related situation. The older I get, the more I understand how important it is to refuse to stay angry at people. No matter how much they make you want to lose it.

We’re human; we are not always noble. True, some of us are just up to no good. But even the best of us are, at any given time, subject to dissing others, letting them down, getting them steamed and getting on their you-know-what lists.

Simply put, we’ll leave people hanging. Instead of hacking them off now by giving them the royal brush-off, telling them “no” or breaking bad news to them, we’ll hack them off later by leaving them in eternal limbo. Cases in point: We are going to let people believe we have more clout at our jobs than we really do … and then when people ask us for favors based on that belief, we’ll dodge them after (or before) any vain attempts to help them. We are going to tell job applicants, “Wow, I’m so impressed with your resume.You’d be perfect!” - after which the interviewee will never hear from us again. We won’t have the heart to tell the people renting from us that we sold the place, especially when we know some of those tenants were already nervous about that very thing.

Boy, are we ever going to tell people, “I’ll get back to you,” and then not do it.

We’re simply going to forget about people. We won’t remember their names. We won’t recognize them when we should. We’ll leave them off of programs, lineups, Best Of lists, thank-you lists.

We are going, at least at some point, to be rude, inconsiderate and thoughtless when we get behind the wheel of a vehicle. We will definitely drive too fast or, at times, too slowly. We are going to cut somebody off in traffic, especially when we’re three lanes to the left and we decide hey, we need to get off at that exit. We are going to ride the bumper of the person going the speed limit when we want to go faster. We will weave in and out of traffic and “forget” our signal lights exist. And those are just some of the stunts we’ll pull to hack one another off.

We are going to feel threatened by others when they begin a program or movement similar to ours, and we are going to be suspicious of them when they come asking to work with us toward what appears to be a common goal. And we’ll show it.

Finally, if we are profiting from a problem, we are going to do all we can to get rid of anybody who comes along and makes inroads into actually solving said problem.

I’ve seen what staying angry at people does to others. Harbore danger inevitably manifests as bitterness and unforgiveness, and it’s a poison more toxic than cyanide, arsenic and bella donna combined. So I tell myself that for every person who’s royally hacked me off, I know there’s somebody who has been royally hacked off by me. And it helps that I practice a faith that teaches that people aren’t the ones from whom blessings come … and that if a particular blessing is for me, people are not going to stop it.

It’s said the best revenge is living well. I say the best revenge is tossing off any cloaks of anger and wrapping one’s self in a cloak of love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance … Hmmm. Read that somewhere before.

The older I get, the more I get it.

Don’t let the sun go down on your email: [email protected]

Style, Pages 47 on 04/06/2014