Anger is a powerful emotion that's driven by our insecurities and beliefs about the level of power we have to accomplish our goals. For some of us, we find it easier to maintain anger than to embrace forgiveness or express compassion for those who don't measure up to our high expectations of human behavior.
Whenever we feel angry toward someone, we lash out at them with venomous words and deeds. We anxiously and urgently have the urge to respond now, immediately, without regards to the pain and suffering we might inflict on others. And rarely, if ever, do we take the time to think before we act.
What is really strange about anger is that it comes into our lives without any warnings whatsoever. In other words, we don't leave our homes to go to a movie or ball game expecting to become angry. We seek pleasurable things because they don't make us angry. Yet, we can explode with anger at the movie if someone spills popcorn or a drink on us, or continues to squash our knees as they make numerous trips to the concessions area.
What can we do about anger? Well, one thing we can do is exercise patience in all of our actions. We experience patience infrequently because it represents confidence, contentment, compassion and power. And until we become aware of the need to remove the layers of victim beliefs preventing us from achieving enlightenment, we will only sporadically experience brief, uncontrollable moments of patience.
For us to express patience, we first must condition our minds to obey us. To do this means we must believe we have control over what happens in our lives. This control is not the same as having control over someone dying, becoming ill, losing their jobs, or experiencing intense heat or cold weather. Control is how we interpret and respond to seemingly uncontrollable situations.
Some of the obvious things we can control is our behavior. We can act compassionate towards someone who is shouting angry words at us, or the person talking loudly while we are trying to watch a movie. All of these are opportunities for us to express patience rather than anger.
Obviously, patience is not a quality we see expressed by many people. The recent brouhaha between the professor and policeman is typically the way people act. When we believe someone has infringed on our rights, space, or time, most of us become angry. And during our moments of anger we say and do things we would never do if we took the time to think about the situation.
When we are willing to relinquish our claim to being right and correct in all our actions, then we open ourselves up to see endless possibilities for us not to be angry. In hindsight, we are able to critically judge the professor and policeman actions based on our own level of awareness. If we are rarely patient, we seek justification for a point of view that supports how we would feel if someone does something to us that we feel is unjustified.
Meanwhile, any judgments or advice from an angry person to another angry person is worthless. Perhaps what is said sounds politically and socially correct, but it doesn't help us to overcome anger. It just delays it until the next time. And the next time the physical damage or hurt we cause others might be more severe.
For us to condition ourselves to become patient, we must seek an inner knowledge of self-discovery that enlightens us to perceive ourselves without societal labels of race, color, gender, political affiliations, and so forth. These are the things responsible for our ignorance, not for the knowledge we need to overcome our anger.
Similarly, if we desire to acquire the knowledge that defines us without our limitations, we must be willing to seek it. This requires a certain level of forgiveness or our parts. We first must be willing to forgive ourselves each type we succumb to anger. We must also be willing to forgive those who become angry toward us. Now, we are able to move in a continual process of creating compassion, confidence, and power in our lives. These are the cornerstone of our knowledge for achieving patience in our lives.
The difference between anger and patience is knowledge. Patience is not magical, we must work for it.
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