sky to heaven - the invisible life.

The last time I got really angry was when I almost got hit by a car. I was about to cross the street one Saturday night, and I saw a black sedan waiting to make a left turn far across the opposite side of the street. I had a sixth sense that something might happen, but I didn’t listen to it because I thought it was just a crazy thought. The light was green, so I crossed. And before I got to the middle of the street, I hear a SCREEEECH! I turn, and the black sedan is stopped two feet away with the headlights shining all over me. He had made his left turn at high speed, and I guess he didn’t see me until the very last second. As I kept on walking, I glared at him, raised my hand, and said “Asshole!”

In the past, I probably would have felt justified in my reaction. I would have told all my friends about how I almost got hit by a crazy driver. And I would have been upset for the rest of the day.

But this time, a few moments later, I regretted my reaction. Because my ideal is to stop getting angry – and of course, I’m still a long way off. I still get angry, but I don’t believe anymore that it’s a good thing for me to be. It’s unhealthy, unproductive, and not very useful in resolving situations. And getting angry makes me unhappy. If I happen to be in a good mood, and then something happens and I get angry, it’s hard to return to that good mood on the same day.

I started to think about why I got angry at the driver. The driver should have seen me earlier. The driver shouldn’t have been driving so fast. The driver should have… and that’s when I realized that the surface reason why people get angry is because they think someone else did something wrong. Because somebody else should have done something, but didn’t; or because they shouldn’t have done something, but did. Anger starts with the “shoulds” and “shouldn’ts” we expect from other people.

Let’s assume that this is the case, that when you get angry, it’s always justified because someone else did do something absolutely wrong. If the person immediately apologizes, you might start to feel better. But still you will feel uneasy, because you hope they don’t do the same thing again in the future. If the person doesn’t apologize, it makes you more upset. Sometimes the person is gone (like the driver), or there is just no one there to make an apology to. Maybe they just don’t think they made a mistake, which makes you even more angry. So you lose whatever good mood you were in, and you enter into a bad mood. And this means, you are paying an emotional price for someone else’s mistake. You pay with your own happiness.

I don’t like getting angry because I don’t want to pay for somebody else’s mistake. I don’t want to lose my good mood just because another person did something wrong. If my peace of mind depends on everybody else around me not making mistakes, then I know I’m never going to be happy – because everybody makes mistakes. Somebody, somewhere, is eventually going to make a mistake in my vicinity. And soon. It’s inevitable. It’s almost impossible for somebody NOT to make a mistake because nobody is close to my version of perfection.

And I’m going to get angry – because I think that mistake is going to affect my life. Because that’s really the deeper reason why we get angry – because we believe that somebody else’s mistake is going to negatively impact our life in some way. Their mistake is somehow going to cost us - or it already did cost us. Because if somebody makes a mistake and it doesn’t affect our life, we don’t care – so we don’t get angry.

I have to learn to live with the fact that not everything is going to go perfectly – in other words, the way I want it to. Many people use up a lot of emotional energy in getting angry because the world is not going the way they think it should be going. The driver should have paid more attention. Your secretary should have remembered the memo. Your boyfriend should have called you. Your student should have done his homework. Your husband should spend more time with the kids. In all of these cases, you have an expectation of the world, and the world didn’t or doesn’t meet it. This means you think the world is something which it is not. Which means your anger is a result of not fully understanding the world as it is, and not just simply a mistake by another person. The other person didn’t just make a mistake – you also made the mistake of assuming the other person would behave in a different way than they actually did. You, quite literally, didn’t see what was coming – just as I didn’t see the driver coming. Which means that on a deeper level, anger is a result of our own ignorance.

Back to almost getting hit by a car. I’m sure the driver didn’t intend to almost hit me. And just as I had gotten angry and afraid because I almost got killed that night, he was probably also afraid that he had gotten very close to killing someone that night. So the ideal state for me would be to not lose my peace. Perhaps I could have said to the driver, “Hey, man, be careful next time. Next time, you might hit somebody you know.” If everybody drove around thinking that they might hit someone they know, people would drive a lot more carefully. Or I could have said, “Hey, man, is everything okay?” To the driver and to myself, either of these lines would have been much more productive than “Asshole.”