The Anger In Me
I will add but a word. We are all very near despair. The sheathing that floats us over its waves is compounded of hope, faith in the unexplainable worth and sure issue of effort, and the deep, subconscious content which comes from the exercise of our powers. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
That was part of a speech given by Justice Holmes in March 1900 at a dinner of the Suffolk, Massachusetts Bar in which he spoke of life as action, the use of our powers to their height. But I think it is the assumption that “we are all very near despair” that resonated with me, the nearness of despair as a given. I recognize this feeling, and I know I am not alone. It makes me vulnerable and reactive, and now and then, anger erupts.
In fact, I recently had an encounter in the supermarket checkout line with a man whose aggressive energy was immediately palpable. I won’t elaborate on what precipitated our verbal exchange, but he was nasty and intrusive and clearly did not approve of me. There were insults and condemnations; it escalated. My inner Buddha became a fighting spirit, but in a drunken useless way, flailing about, wasting energy, and nothing was helped or solved by my engaging with this jerk.
“I’m just a guy from New Jersey,” he said at one point, “and I speak my mind.”
“And I’m from New York,” I told him, “but that doesn’t mean you have to be an asshole.”
I suppose I was indistinguishable from him in that moment. Afterwards, I felt sick and ashamed. I don’t like to think of myself as combative, and it didn’t do any good anyway. But I suppose I’ve always had a bit of ferocity in me. I suddenly remembered this little ditty my father wrote for me when I was a young teenager:
"She seems so fair and tender,
but she's ready for the fray,
and if you dare offend her,
you'll ne'er forget the day."
People fought in my family. There were serious fights with curses hurled and objects thrown, and the orientation I was given to the world outside was fraught with warning and distrust. There was a rage in me that I learned to tamp down over the years, but the supermarket incident made me see that it’s still there, and I felt shaken for the rest of the day. I decided I better learn something from the encounter, and here’s what I’ve come up with:
One, I learned that I have become too insular. I surround myself with kindred spirits and thus forget that there are multitudes with views I find appalling. I probably cannot change their thinking, but it’s important to know that they exist.
And I became reacquainted with the fact that I have anger in me, quite a lot of it. And the relentless onslaught of disillusioning and disturbing happenings in our country and the world has drawn it very near to the surface. How can we not be outraged?
I learned that a hostile encounter can shake me to the core and ruin my entire day. I ingest the toxicity and become ugly.
But I am also reminded of the counterpoint. Kindness and restraint can set a different tone and have a lingering and far-reaching effect. Humor is powerful too. And a smile.
William Stafford wrote about how much of a difference even a small gesture can make:
I’m saved in this big world by unforeseen
friends, or times when only a glance
from a passenger beside me, or just the tired
branch of a willow inclining toward earth,
may teach me how to join earth and sky.
So, the dust-up in the supermarket has left me with resolve to be a nicer person, someone who smiles instead of snarling, who defuses conflict instead of empowering those who incite it.
I also started thinking about hope again, near as I have been to the shadow of despair. I do have an addiction to hope, or whatever it is to which I apply that label. Maybe it's indicative of a lack of courage, a childish inability to embrace the daunting realities, a long habit of wishfulness that I cannot let go of. But I adhere to Rebecca Solnit’s description of hope as a capacious concept that acknowledges uncertainty and thus implies the possibility of action. It’s the belief that what we do matters even though how and when it may matter, who and what it may impact, are not things we can know beforehand.
My dear mentor Dan reminds me that hope has its risks; he aspires instead to embrace things as they are, and that’s a tricky Buddhist kind of thing. He counsels me with a loving-kindness meditation that summons up compassion and trust. It concludes:
When we live in the present, joy arises for no reason.
It’s all so mysterious and implausible, and I feel further than ever from understanding, but maybe understanding is not the goal.
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An afterword:
A few days later, on the day after his fourth birthday, I had a FaceTime chat with another guru, my grandson Felix. He inhabits the present with admirable exuberance.
“I’m so excited to see a little boy who is four years old,” I told him.
“I’m not little,” he said.
“It’s true,” I said. “You’re not. And I’m sorry we missed your birthday, but I’m going to see you very soon, and we’ll have a special Felix day and lots of fun.”
“Actually, it won’t be very soon,” he replied with cruel candor. And he’s right.
He showed us some of his new Legos and vehicles. “They’re just pretend vehicles,” he pointed out.
But pretending is right up my alley. “Pretending is great!’ I said. “I’m an old lady, and I still like to pretend.”
“Are you going to die?” he asked.
The word “old” is what triggered his concern.
“No,” I said. “Not for a very long time. I’m just a little bit old. Not very.”
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I’ll end this bumpy post with one more quote, this by the writer and humorist James Thurber: “Let us not look back in anger, nor forward in fear, but around in awareness.”
And I shall aim for that, for as long as I am given.