On Anger: A Trip up the Eastern.

It takes only a small event to tip over a possible, if tight, morning into a confrontation with too many neighbours and too little temper. One of the dogs was unexpectedly sick and needed dosing at the last minute before I left for a medical appointment in the city. Now would be the time for the sixteen lights to be passed before the freeway entrance to all be green, but are they? Worse yet, the light board on the Eastern informed me that a twenty minute trip would today take forty minutes, and the clogged traffic confirmed that diagnosis. At points during the trip the light board actually went backwards, and the prognosis of twenty minutes remaining became twenty-five. The temper got shorter and shorter.

            Now surely these delays are outside my control. So why so much anger? Underneath the anger is fear, in this case fear of spending a long time in the medical suite having missed my appointment and having to wait for the next person to be seen before me, thus putting me late for a series of commitments throughout the day. Underneath anger is usually fear, under even the anger of grief, although in that case what one is afraid of has already happened. I can’t control these delays, but I can control my behaviour, and let a neighbour into the lane in front of me: the little baby suit hanging in their rear window prompting further reflection.

            I recently read of the insatiable anger of a mother whose month-old baby had died, such grief and anger that people flinched from the furnace of her unrelenting sorrow and passion of mourning. Such sadness that to hear of it must fill any feeling soul with compassion. It made me think of the description of life as a vale of tears, a common description in past times when infant mortality was a large part of life, when infectious disease and random events put mortality at all ages in your face, so to speak, and when the preciousness of unstable life, hanging always by a thread, was evident and honoured in our worship.

            If due to grief life could be seen as a vale of tears, it could also be seen as a realm of fire, as the Buddha described it in his Fire Sermon: everything burning with birth, aging, death; with desire, hatred, suffering, with sorrow, pain, despair; the eye, the ear, the body, the intellect, everything aflame. The Buddha advised his audience of monks to seek dispassion, and that’s easier said than done. Passion, of course, is the word we use to describe the sufferings of Christ, who submitted to the anger of others to free the world, not from grief, but from death. As long as we feel attachment we must feel grief, and who would be wholly without loves?

            So then at last we passed the truck accident, the police and all the wreckage, and the traffic, having partaken of the events of the morning started to flow. I’d reach my appointment after all. All angers are not the same: some are much larger than others. I wrote this blog during my trip up the Eastern. Then I grabbed my goods off the floor where they spilled when I slammed on the brakes and raced to the medical suite to hear the latest news about my health.