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Anger
Anger
Anger is somehow my favourite emotion. We all have plenty of it, some more than others, and it is the only emotion that actually "does" anything. Of course I don't mean anger as violence or aggression, but then most of us find it hard to think of anger as anything else.
Our society somehow thinks that violence is OK, and the only way to either express our anger or to get things done. Violence is what causes war, and allows us to kill others. And yet we somehow glorify violence in many forms, with guns and movies that fill our society. But isn't this just giving in to the instinct to fight and kill? There are rarely times that this instinct can help us directly but there are other ways to use it.
Anger is only energy - our energy that drives to make changes in the world around us and in ourselves and energy for effort to achieve our goals. And change is growth, and growth is the only evidence of life.
My Motto is that Anger is good! It is what we do with it that can be good or bad and Anger takes a lifetime to learn how to use, and despite age, we frequently fall back into old habits. No one has the balance just right, but that is not a reason for avoiding anger, it will only slip through in a different form and trip us up more severely.
Anger is our drive, our engine, and just like learning to drive a car, we need to learn how to control the accelerator so that we don't crawl along, accelerate too quickly out of control, or what is worse, Kangaroo hopping in between. It is not all or none, but requires the right amount of energy for the right occasion. This is like the old adage about using the right hammer for a nail - you can't use a mallet to hit a thumb tack, and you can't use a tack hammer on a four inch nail.
Aristotle, the Greek Philosopher, probably said it best over 2000 years ago:
"Anybody can become angry - that is easy, but to be angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose, and in the right way - that is not within everybody's power and is not easy."
Probably the most important lesson to learn with anger is to Keep it Safe - as we said in the beginning. If Anger as the instinct which leads us to destroy and be destructive, then our task is to find a way to use anger constructively. This means building, doing, making, and even creating.
But probably even more important is to ask - Is this good or helpful? And while this may be quite simplistic, it is quite easy to judge whether something is not good or helpful, and beyond that, maybe we are wasting our energy.
We will talk more about Anger as we move on.