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Today's
quotation:
Anger burns up all that is noble. It is
a consuming fire, born in the fires
of destruction. At the end, it leaves the victim nothing but a
wreck of
his or her better self, burned out, blackened and dead,
like forest trees over which a great fire has swept.
Julian P. Johnson
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Today's
Meditation:
When I
witness people being angry, I always wonder just what
triggers their anger. I've seen what other people
have done, but I've also seen other people respond to the
same types of things without becoming angry at all,
without losing their cool and letting their anger take
control of them. And that's what I see mostly when I
see angry people-- human beings who have let their anger
take control of their actions and their words, and who are
doing and saying things that they normally wouldn't even
consider doing or saying.
When
we allow anger to take over, we definitely run the risk of
allowing it to consume us. Some people hold on to
their anger for so long that they've lost touch of what it
means to not be angry. We do have better selves,
though, and it's important that we allow that better self
to deal with the issue at hand rather than allowing the
anger to cause us to do or say things that we'll regret
later. Many a relationship has been killed by words
said in anger; many a person has lost some of the best
things in their lives because they allowed their anger to
stifle their better selves and unleash their worst sides.
Our
anger is natural-- there are some things that happen or
that other people do that are going to anger us.
What we do with that anger, though, is up to us.
Personally, I like to use it as a trigger, if you will, a
catalyst that forces me to look for another side of the
story that is making me angry. If someone says a lie
about me, will I be just as angry if I consider that the
person is very unhappy, and that lying about other people
is a way that he or she is trying to deal with
dissatisfaction in life? If I'm angry because
someone stole from me, what will happen to my anger if I
find out that the person who stole is going through
extremely tough times and just made a bad decision?
Let's
not allow our anger to burn us up and leave us a shell of
our former selves. Anger is a very real emotion, but
if we allow it to consume us, then we've lost a tremendous
part of who we are, and we can cause true damage not just
to ourselves, but to those whom we love. When we
become angry, let's turn that anger into something else
that is much more constructive than anger, which is so
often destructive.
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