The Consolation of Anger
A book arrived today from my friend in Boston, a mix of words and their meanings fully wrought. I was reading it mindlessly today, waiting on Tin to finish swimming, when I got to the third word – ANGER.
ANGER is the deepest form of compassion, for another, for the world, for the self, for a life, for the body, for a family and for all our ideals, all vulnerable and all, possibly about to be hurt. Stripped of physical imprisonment and violent reaction, anger is the purest form of care, the internal living flame of anger always illuminates what we belong to, what we wish to protect and what we are willing to hazard ourselves for. What we usually call anger is only what is left of its essence when we are overwhelmed by its accompanying vulnerability, when it reaches the lost surface of our mind or our body’s incapacity to hold it, or when it touches the limits of our understanding. What we name as anger is actually only the incoherent physical incapacity to sustain this deep form of care in our outer daily life; the unwillingness to be large enough and generous enough to hold what we love helplessly in our bodies or our mind with the clarity and breadth of our whole being.
I go to sleep each night looking out the window at the stars that I see in the night’s sky, and I wake in the morning to the palm tree I see towering out of my neighbor’s yard. I keep waiting for the anger to disappear, and instead I find it is a fluid type of emotion, an anger that boils when I think of what can’t be undone, an ANGER that roils when I hold it in my heart encased in a plastic bubble.
Yet, as much as I like to hold it close to my bosom, I know my day’s work has only just begun when I open my eyes, because my task once again is to open my heart.
