I.27 — Looking at Anger

Anger arrives fast and sure of itself, faster than almost anything else attention meets, and entirely convinced it is right while it is happening. Speed and certainty are worth noticing on their own, apart from whatever the anger is about, because they hold true of nearly every anger, justified or not.

There is a gap, usually small, between the spark of it and the word said next. Anger wants that gap closed at once, wants itself spent immediately, in a sentence, a slammed door, a message sent before it can be reread. Looking widens the gap. Not by force, not by swallowing the anger back down where it will only wait, but by staying with the heat a moment longer than habit allows, watching it rather than obeying it.

Try this once, the next time a small anger comes, not the largest kind, one of the ordinary daily ones. Before speaking, take three breaths and hold attention on the heat itself: where it sits, how fast it wants to move. Then speak, if there is still something worth saying.

Compare, afterward, what got said in the gap to what would likely have been said in the rush. The difference is the whole of what looking offers here.