Anger is Sad’s Bodyguard

It is easy to celebrate when your plan is working, when life is exactly as you envision it. However, when your life's story could be told a thousand different unflattering ways, that you could tell it over and over as a tragedy, but yet you choose to call it legendary, a tale of survival and grace, that's when you prove to understand contentment. When what you see in front of you is so far outside of what you dreamed but you have the belief, the boldness, the courage to call it beautiful instead of calling it wrong, that's freedom.

Though the heart may have been made to be broken, it is also made to heal. "Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional" is a Buddhist wisdom and it's true.

Suffering isn't what is happening to us but how we process what's happening to us. After repeated disappointments and failures, many expectedly deal with pain and fear by buying hope either from religion or culture. Fear is addictive. The fearful assumes that life is a lonely journey. They stop seeing misery as first a result of negative mindsets.

A very wise man Thich Nhat Hanh promotes a better alternative, saying “Letting go gives us freedom, and freedom is the only condition for happiness. If in our heart, we still cling to anything - anger, anxiety, or possessions - we cannot be free.”

Clinging to a bottomless well of desire, expectation, entitlement and grievance is a recipe for misery first for the person who lives it and also for all who have to deal with them. I've had my fair share.

Anger is Sad’s bodyguard. Many angry people are first sad, sad about many other deeper issues. When the futility of not looking in the right places for hope and validation and the disappointment that makes for utter misery becomes overwhelming, anger is born.

It is hard to understand how anyone can imagine that strength and satisfaction can be found in their anger or hate. These two are seductive and addictive, yet horribly ineffective and ultimately unsatisfying.

I imagine one of the reasons we stay angry so stubbornly is because we believe that once anger is gone, we will be forced to deal with pain. We fear the vulnerability that comes with not being perpetually angry. I hope you do not get addicted to your pain because you refuse to stop being angry at and hating those who hurt you.

This is a call to courage, to freedom, to taking counter-intuitive steps when life throws us a lemon.

May peace find you!