"If you are patient in one moment of anger, then you will escape a hundred days of sorrow."
All day long I was having run-ins with anger and a few of its closest relatives, disappointment and frustration. Some of my nearest and dearest were struggling with life changes and annoying hassles that were putting up impassable roadblocks between them and their happiness. Before I stepped on the mat, I was annoyed and angry at them for wallowing and refusing to just let it go and move on. It was a classic case of anger begetting anger. Those words of wisdom were timed perfectly that afternoon.
I'm not opposed to anger. It's a completely normal and sometimes healthy human emotion. Sometimes a little bit of well-expressed anger can go a long way. When our rights are crumbled up and tossed in the trash like yesterday's AM New York, fiery anger can motivate us to stand up for ourselves and demand our angry voices be heard. Healthy doses of anger seem almost required for social change. No need to trouble ourselves with changing something if it doesn't conjure up our angry alter ego.
But when anger is only a feeling and not also a motivator for some sort of progress, it does nothing but get in the way of our happiness. Momentary anger can indeed put us on a road to lasting sadness. Angry people say things they don't mean and behave in shameful and regrettable ways. Anger makes us damage (sometimes beyond repair) relationships we would otherwise wrap our loving arms around and lay a few big smooches on.
As the wise proverb advises, patience is the answer. A few deep breaths and a little patience give us time to hit the breaks and make that U-turn back on the road to happiness. Patience gives us the green light to bypass Anger Avenue and its jarring potholes altogether. So why then is it so ridiculously hard to stay patient and stop ourselves from giving the bird to the guy in the car behind us?
In his The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James, the Father of American Psychology, wrote:
If we were to ask the question: 'What is human's life's chief concern?' one of the answers we should receive would be: 'It is happiness.' How to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness, is in fact for most men at all times the secret motive of all they do, and of all they are willing to endure. (pp. 67)
If James was right, even the things we say and do in anger are attempts to find happiness. We might be driving the mercedes when we should be in the jeep, but we are still just trying our darnedest to get up that big mountain to happiness. Fueled with anger, we are probably driving too fast to realize we are actually in the wrong car for the trip.
In those last few moments of yoga class, I realized that my angry friends are all just aimlessly searching the map for happiness and I was buckled in the passenger seat next to them. The mix of their anger with my anger might just make them drive right off the side of the mountain. But with patience we might all slowly pull into the rest stop to stretch our legs and rethink our itinerary.
James didn't claim that we all find happiness only that we are all looking for it. Maybe patience is what sets those who have happiness apart from those of us still speeding past the right turn.
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