One of the great emotions that seems to overwhelm all of us is anger. I recently watched a man exploding in anger over what appeared to be a rather minor incident at a shop. Somehow, he thought the clerk was being disrespectful and he began to rage which is atypical in the society that I presently live in. I was taken aback and I thought to myself, that poor soul that is the man who is getting angry, he’s actually shortening his life because anger is obviously a toxin. It doesn’t make an individual feel good at all and it is extremely individualistic, isn’t it?
Because if I say, I love you, everyone understands. I love you like perhaps a lover. I love you like a boyfriend, a girlfriend. I love you like a father, a mother, a brother, a parent, a friend. We all understand love.
But if I get angry and I say, I hate you. Gosh. How do you hate me? I don’t understand at all. And this wave of nausea seems to come over us, doesn’t it?
So what do we do when we stumble in to anger? Well, I think the very first thing that we have to do for sure after the initial wave comes over us and we suppress the need to respond the so called knee jerk reaction. We need to pause and breathe deeply and reflect breathe in and then calm down, and we have to label the emotion for what it is. This is anger. That’s it.
That’s all it is. It’s not love. Remove ourselves if we possibly can from that particular situation. And all of us have been disrespected by people in life. We’ve been called awful names at times, I’m sure, detached.
And we have our dignity. We wanna fight back. But I always try to think to myself, what is going on through this other person’s mind? What are their expectations? What are my own expectations?
And then I think many times, gosh, we gotta try to empathize. This person is probably so frustrated because of their life for God’s sakes and their life is not my life and you think, thank God. Thank God. You know, I was reading recently, if you’ve really been offended, what a nice way to remove deep seated anger, long term anger is to write a letter. Just write a letter.
Just vent yourself, perhaps even use some profanity and then go in the back garden and burn it. Burn the letter. Just burn it up. Throw it away. Gosh, calm yourself down because many times, once you utter words, they become real.
This is the difficulty. If you get angry at someone and you say unkind things, those words are now concretized. They exist in the world. So training ahead of time for sure, this person or this situation is going to upset me, so I must control it. And then of course, we have the spontaneous anger.
Right? Perhaps somebody hits your car or hits you or insults you and that’s when you need to really grab the situation and hold yourself in check. And at that moment, forgive yourself and forgive others. Very important. And do you think to yourself, what are the great philosophers say about anger?
Well, I think Aristotle, he says basically that anyone can become angry. That’s basically easy. But how do we control this anger? Right? We cannot be governed by anger.
We have to be governed by reason. Seneca, a philosopher from the first century, I’ve just read one of his letters on anger. In fact, he says in a sense, once again the same thing that anger destroys the person, meaning me, the person who is getting angry. It’s not helping the situation at all. And then finally, Marcus Aurelius, of course, reminds us that things will always get better.
Things will not have to get worse at all. There’s always another day. There’s always another time. And I think that a lot of controlling our anger has to do with the self. We need to calm ourself down.
Right? We need to take that daily walk in the park if we can or perhaps we need to write in our notebook or say our prayers, go to a church, whatever it is and say to the self myself self listen, if you are an angry person, you’re gonna shorten your life by perhaps as much as ten years because, you know, angry people don’t seem to live a long time. If you think of your grandmother, for instance, the person that was my grandmother, my mother, they were filled with joy, and they lived long and pleasant lives. Right? And I think that this is the point, isn’t it?
And really, if on a Judeo Christian sense, if we go to perhaps Jesus I mean, Jesus had a lot to say about anger because he ultimately said that it’s a poison to the soul. And he says this in Matthew, talks a lot about this. So we have the main gospels, of course, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Right? And anger must not be allowed to fester, to grow inside the self.
So take your walk. Say to yourself, I control the situation. Who makes me angry? I do. If that is really true that I really occupy my mind and myself, then I can’t control the anger.
I was reading the other day about a book because anger, of course, manifests itself ultimately, I think, in war. And I listened to a podcast on the book, and I haven’t read the book yet, but I will. It’s a book by Annie Jacobson, and it’s called nuclear war, a scenario. And she discusses how the Earth, the world civilization is over in two hours fundamentally because of anger. In the book’s case, North Korea launches a missile against Washington DC and then another one against California, and the Americans respond.
Within six minutes, they’ve launched, but their missiles have to fly over Russia. Russia thinking that they’re attacking Russia, responds to it and destroys America, and away it goes. So within two hours, this anger, this war, if you will, this destruction of humanity has occurred. So this has to be the ultimate result of anger, war. Now surely, we are elevated enough as beings in the twenty first century to be able to sit down, but it doesn’t appear to be the case at the moment, does it?
But I’m hoping that with critical thinking and with a bit of love and a bit of patience and all the things we discussed earlier that we can actually come to a place that we can put our egos away and we can say, look, we can live in a peaceful world. We can live on a peaceful planet and we don’t need to kill each other and be angry with each other. Because the old saying from John Lennon, it will all be fine in the end and if it’s not fine, it’s not the end. So in other words, we don’t have to get angry because we can resolve any situation through dialogue. So think about it.
The next time you get angry, just pause for a moment and put your anger away and resolve the situation rationally. And you know what they say, you know what they say, critical thinking is excellent especially if you’re going to solve anger in yourself and in the world and critical thinking is, of course, great. It’s great. You take care. God bless. No more anger. Bye bye.