On Anger

It’s not that I don’t consider Zen a worthy goal, I do. And I can strive for serenity and a calm at the center of my being along with the best of them. It’s just that on our way to peace and harmony I think that maybe anger is getting a bad rap, and I feel weirdly compelled to defend it.

See, I was raised to be polite at the expense of honesty. I was raised to suppress anything at all negative, for the sake of the common good. I was taught to call the falsity and emptiness that was left behind “happiness.” My parents weren’t evil – in fact at times they were absolutely indulgent. And sometimes they just wanted my happiness so much that I felt obliged to give it to them, regardless of what I was actually feeling. It’s easy, in that situation, to lose track of what you’re feeling entirely after a while.

So anger, when I rediscovered it, was a revelation to me. Almost like developing a super power. And I felt sort of ripped off, really, thinking back on how I was indoctrinated to dismiss it as bad, in such a black and white way. Not just by my parents, either – well meaning and rather heart-warmingly dysfunctional as they were back then – but by everyone and everything, everywhere that I looked.

So to me, saying that anger is a bad thing is like saying that fire is a bad thing, that you’re better off without the light and warmth it brings to your life, better to be calm always and shivering. Like fire, anger must be used wisely and in balance. You don’t want to toss it Molotov Cocktail into your house, color the drapes in flames and set your husband’s shoes with it so you can sit back and watch him dance. No, you use the proper tools and methods for handling it, use it in it’s proper places, roast a weenie for sustenance or burn the photograph of an old lover for catharsis. And if a spark jumps from the hearth and onto the floor or even a pant leg, you don’t eschew fire forever – you stamp out the bit that got away from you, you clean up the mess it’s left behind as best you can, and if there’s a scar at the end, you learn and you remember from it.

Without fire you might huddle together peacefully enough against the cold, but probably no one would ever strip off and dance. Without anger you might move placidly enough through this life, at least as far as anyone can see on your surface; you might co-exist and even harmonize with the people around you, in a fashion. But is it really you, in the end? How can you know?

I think sometimes we’re made to burn, to melt ourselves down to essence, and when we deny that urge, that compulsion, we’re stuck with muck and confusion and things we should have let go of a long time ago. Remember that the volcano, once unleashed at last, doesn’t just destroy. It creates new land, too, fertile and cleared for new growth.

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