I’m angry. I’m angry because I love you, and care about your future — rather, our collective future and our wellbeing — and I feel powerless to protect you from those strange, delusional few who are out there: those whose aim is to foment and to feed off your fears, your need for emotional expression and creative satiety, your need to be seen, to be held, and to belong… to control your every move, to make you believe you’re fragile and weak, and then to profit from your self-induced illnesses.
I’m angry because I don’t know if there’s anything I can do about it.
What we call anger is often simply the unwillingness to live the full measure of our fears or of our not knowing, in the face of our love for a wife, in the depth of our caring for a son, in our wanting the best, in the face of simply being alive and loving those with whom we live.
David Whyte – “Anger”
It’s a fool’s errand to try to convince anyone of anything; if they’re too easily won over, the victory is shallow, and even worrisome; if they’re obstinate, fearful, or indifferent, the challenge is to be careful, clear, patient, sensitive and mindful. Preaching is inherently useless and self-serving, and fraught with emotional or philosophical shortcuts and lazy, simplifying suppositions. If you intend on making a legitimate point, know your shit, or what are we doing here, exactly? Be ready to defend your position. Be ready to fail.
We tend to come to our own conclusions for our own reasons, by our own efforts, in our own time. Some of them are attained by slow-burn, gradual learning processes, possibly drawn out over an entire lifetime. Others are learned through the inevitable “hard way” of things. In my own efforts to learn and discern the truths of things, inherent within those motives and motions is the necessity to proliferate that sapience and distilled information toward those who may not be able to see it. In saying this, it sounds rather arrogant and vain, perhaps merely a projection of a need to satisfy something deeper, cloaked behind hurts and scars earned in my early years. I can’t say for sure, because the ever-present journey toward self-knowing, discovery, and recovery has its own fruits and failings. I may, in fact, be just as ignorant as those whom I wish to enlighten. Nevertheless, my objectives remain bound to a personal code of integrity, and the impulse to uplift has never faded. I want to believe it is trustworthy and logical to rely upon that.
Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured.
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It is essential to question our motives, to understand why we are driven to do what we do, to have something true and solid to stand upon. Of course, truth changes. My truth has evolved, being regularly tested and tempered, and continues to emerge. The world today is utterly rife with superficial, childish, cowardly pedants, pundits, experts, and politicians who could really care less about the wellbeing of the world and its billions of humans, never mind your community, your neighbors, or your children. I find this reality to be infuriating, for it is those same caricatures of humanity that many of us generally defer our own critical thinking and decision-making toward. They’re in our faces all the time, everywhere, with predictable, scripted, emotionally-charged, misleading slogans, or egotistic banter, derived from tried-and-true plots, themes, and storylines.
Nothing we’re experiencing or going through in the world today is truly original. The mediums may have changed, the languages may have devolved, but the underlying parasitic, predatory throughlines are there for us to discern and endlessly debate. Perhaps it is all integral to Expedition Humanity that we face these obstacles, time and again, variation upon variation, so that we may glean ever more about our better, deeper natures; to afford ourselves every conceivable opportunity to explore “I am” in all its limitless shadow and light.
Transformation is my favorite game and in my experience, anger and frustration are the result of you not being authentic somewhere in your life or with someone in your life. Being fake about anything creates a block inside of you. Life can’t work for you if you don’t show up as you.
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Why be angry? Why be frustrated? Why indulge fear and injustice on any level, if ultimately there is no finality, no answer, no completion? I have no idea how long I may have remaining in/with this organic vessel. I’ve nearly been freed of it a number of times already, along this storyline. Yet, I chose every time, apparently, to come back. Is there more to do, then? Am I on mission?
I guess for now, I’ll keep walking.
Solvitur ambulando