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.
