Anger – Friend or Foe?

"The world needs anger. The world often continues to allow evil because it isn’t angry enough" – Bede Jarrett

Photo By Joel Davies

Anger is a daunting emotion, a sentiment that we try to evade or even conceal till our wit allows us too. It’s interesting to see how we are repulsed by anger; even an association with it is dreaded. We look down at ourselves for letting it get the best of us, though it makes me wonder, isn’t it just another emotion, a feeling without which we would be incomplete?

Someone once said to me, life is about feeling the feelings, every single one of them. It’s about letting yourself laugh and letting yourself cry, it’s about the empathy and the apathy, no one greater than the other. Would you have ever laughed if you’d never cried? Would you have ever felt love if you’d never been jealous? How would their smile melt your heart if you’d never seen them frown?

Emotions are a great way to learn about your self. They help identify your likes and dislikes, just like a tummy ache warns you about the street food you had. Is a tummy ache bad? Not at all. It’s simply a warning mechanism to prevent you from having something that doesn’t suit your body. Negative emotions play a similar role in our lives; they identify the need to make a change. It could be a change of job, a change in your surroundings or even a change within.

Our natural tendency to negative emotions like anger, jealousy or even dislike is to put the blame on someone or something else. It’s much easier to calm the mind if you can rationalize your innocence and prove to yourself that you’re the victim not the culprit. Though such an approach can help you de-stress relatively quickly, it hinders your ability to create change. It gives you the perception that the situation is beyond your control and therefore you cannot influence it.

When you ask people why they hate their job, somehow it is never their fault. Either the supervisor isn’t cordial, or the work is boring, and sometimes even the co-workers take the blame. But have you ever questioned yourself as to why is the work boring or why is the supervisor not supportive? Did you pick a job you didn’t love in the first place? Is your quality of work good enough for you to be in your boss’s good books? Do you treat your co-workers the way you’d like to be treated? It’s rather intimidating to blame your self for your own troubles and frustrations, and though it may not seem so, accepting your fault is the easiest way to make things better. Isn’t it yourself that you have the most control over? Then shouldn't changing yourself be the easiest? 

We need to learn to listen to ourselves, analyze why we feel the way we do and then constructively release our energy to make appropriate changes. Sleeping over a bad day or drinking away in frustration will not make the problems disappear. Not identifying the cause of the tummy ache will only land you at the clinic, and not listening to your emotions will only drain you of yourself over time.

Nature is a prime example that uses anger to create positive changes in the world. Flowers would never smell good if they didn’t hate being immobile and the wind would never carry their fragrance if it didn’t crave to be noticed. Would rivers carve through mountains if they didn’t long to be one with the ocean and would the sun rise if it didn’t envy the moon?

Make anger your best friend, before it becomes your worst enemy.