Engagement Is A Two-Way Effort

Not much new to say here except that if you want interaction with someone or some activity, it will require engagement.  By definition, engagement means interaction and involvement, which, of course, means taking part.  When you take part in something, you are engaged, involved.

There is a school of thought that suggests a person only has to do his/her personal inner work in order for relationships—with people or activities—to work out for the best.  In other words, it doesn’t make any difference what others do in that relationship or activity.  I am here to dispute this.  It DOES make a difference if others in a relationship or activity also DO something that shows their involvement.  All parties need to be engaged if a relationship or activity is to be resolved to the benefit of each of those parties.

You can do your work on your own.  You can gain a measure of satisfaction as you do your own work.  You can feel resolved.  However, a relationship involves more than one party, so it requires all parties to be actively engaged in securing the best possible outcome for each person.  The same is true for any activity involving more than one person.

You cannot make someone else engage.  When the other party or parties do not choose to engage, one of two things happens.  Either, it becomes clear that the relationship no longer exists in actual terms, so you turn your attention to releasing the other party.  Or, you hold fast to your work lovingly embracing the other party until such time as a light begins to dawn in his/her own mind and heart. That can lead to reaching back regardless of whatever risk one may feel.

In his book, “Anger,” Thich Nhat Hanh uses an example of a parent/child relationship to illustrate engagement.

My dear child, I know you suffer a lot.  For many years, you have suffered a lot.  When you suffer, I suffer, too.  How can I be happy when my child suffers? So I recognize that both you and I suffer.  Can we do something about it?  Can we come together and search for a solution?  Can we talk?  I really want to restore communication, but alone, I cannot do much.  I need your help. 

It is often a risk to reach out to another person with whom there has been a long-standing separation due to disagreements or other issues.  For satisfactory resolution for each party, sooner or later that risk may need to be taken.

The bottom line:  ENGAGEMENT IS A TWO-WAY EFFORT ultimately.  Until a way for engagement occurs, hold fast to your love and your dream of healing and happiness.  You will always benefit from your effort.

Moving Beyond the Hurt

One of the possibilities that occur in relationships is that we will experience hurt.  For some hurt comes early in life as a result of uncaring or immature parenting.  For others hurt may come from the breakup of a first love.  Then there are those of us who seem bent on creating circumstances that can have no outcome other than being deeply hurt and scarred for life. 

Mark Nepo, in “The Book of Awakening,” suggests that there are many ways in which we may discover how to get beyond a hurtful experience.  He says that like a radio that can only receive one station at a time, we may think there is only one way to resolve a difficult relationship.  In reality there are many stations being broadcast at the same time, but we choose the one we are listening to.  Further he states:

“. . . compassion is a deeper thing that waits beyond the tension of choosing sides (choosing a station).  Compassion, in practice, does not require us to give up the truth of what we feel or the truth of our reality.  Nor does it allow us to minimize the humanity of those who hurt us.  Rather, we are asked to know ourselves enough that we can stay open to the truth of others, even when their truth or their inability to live up to their truth has hurt us.”

As a principle of faith, I accept that feeling hurt is a choice I make in how I respond to a hurtful experience with another person.  The fact is, in such a situation we are in pain.  We will stay in that pain until we decide we have had enough it and move on.  Life does not consist only of that particular hurtful experience for any of us.  It is up to us to decide that there are other parts of our life that we can pay attention to that will allow us a momentary change of perspective.  If, in that more serene moment, we can focus our attention on the power of compassion, we will find that we have changed the station to which we are listening.  We hear life in a different way and our pain will recede.

Compassion takes us to another level of our experience of relationship.  It does not take sides in the issue.  Rather we are then in a position to reaffirm our truth and our reality while at the same time recognizing there is a truth the other person is attempting to express.  Life does not require that we all share the same truth.  In fact, individuality requires of us a separate but equal reality.  It is when we judge what the “equal” notion should be that we get into trouble.  We have an equal right to see our reality in our own way and to live with the consequences.

Moving past the hurt will eventually require of us some action.  Hurt does not go away by ignoring it.  It simply falls into the deeper recesses of our consciousness.  That is why some situation from our past may suddenly surface for seemingly no reason.  A current event is like the straw that breaks the camel’s back.  That has happened to me, as I am sure it has for others.  I felt that was what surfaced for a friend when I attempted to share the excitement about an experience I was having.  The truth of my experience as I saw it was one thing.  The truth of the other person clearly saw something quite different.  I was staggered at first and my own past hurts began to surface with the accompanying anger.  At first it was easy to blame my feelings on the action of the other person.  Fortunately, I did not respond out of the environment of the now surfaced anger.  Instead, through working with the facets of the relationship in my mind and heart I found the compassion Mark Nepo wrote about.  The anger was the first to go after that.  Then I realized I had no reason to be hurt.  The truth of my experience was still real, still true.  I was able to return to the joy and satisfaction of my life.

It is not always easy to let go of the things that we feel have produced hurt in our lives.  The choice is ours whether we let go or not.  No matter how remote some of those other stations are that are broadcasting, we owe it to ourselves to search for them.  Tune into the one(s) that bring you to those peaceful moments where you can see things more clearly and resolve any issue that has produced hurt.

 

From Agitation To Meditation

It is Saturday morning, 1974.  I am an Instructor at Casper College in Wyoming.  My wife Barbara is a Social Worker for the State of Wyoming in Casper.  We had planned to drive 300 miles to Denver that weekend to participate in one of Dan Perin's meditation classes at the Whole Life Learning Center. 

But I was half sick.  Tension in the chest, low energy, depression, typical onset of a nasty cold, or worse, the flu.   We debated and finally thought we would try the trip and see how we felt.  We could turn around and come back if I got worse.  So I fired up the 1965 primer-paint Corvair and off we went to Denver. 

In meditation class, we began by lying down and relaxing, our arms stretched out over our head, palms up and hands relaxed.  But my arms would not lie down flat.  There was so much tension in my shoulders that I could not lay my arms out flat on the floor, over my head, the biceps touching the ears.  So I fanned my arms down a bit to let them rest on the floor.

The breathing exercise started, a four count, which Dan explained he had adopted because "it does not mean anything."  Why get hung up on the trinity, the pentagon, the hexagon with all their religious and pagan associations, when four does fine as a breathing count.  I liked that common-sense approach.

Empty the mind and concentrate only on the breathing count, Dan said.  When the mind wanders from it, just come back to the count and start again.  Sirens outside?  Ignore them and come back to the count.  Sounds easy, doesn't it--tune out the outside world and your stray thoughts and just do the simple task of counting your breath.  Thoughts of your job come up?  Or a relationship?  That's okay, just tune it out and go back to the breathing and counting the breath.  Empty and still the mind.  That's all you are to do:  count the breath.  Sound easy?  Yes, but it is not.  And at first, seemingly impossible.

Later, or perhaps in a later session, we were to have a directed meditation.  We did the counting of the breath under Dan's direction, stilled the "random thought generator" that seems to want to run all of the time, then at his instruction, we began meditating on the issue we had predetermined would be the subject of the meditation for the session.  And there was the issue before us, without rancor, tension, anger, desire, just a peaceful contemplation of it and an addressing of what the issues were.  Just still the mind and then throw the problem up and look at it.  Just look.   That, of course, is the correct way to look at all personal problems, or any problem.  But again, easier said than done.  (And if everyone did that, it would put Judge Judy and Judge Mathis out of business, would it not?)

In the last session of the day I was suddenly aware that my arms and shoulders were completely relaxed, and my arms could lie on the floor above my head in perfect repose.  When in the evening we drove back to Casper, all of my symptoms of the morning had disappeared.  No tension and congestion in the chest, no depression, and my energy levels were up to any challenge.  It was unbelievable.  It was only at that point that I was fully aware of the toll that anxiety and tension takes on the body and how it is the mind that is creating it and that we do have control over our mind, should we exercise that control in a disciplined way.  I had let the conflicts, frustrations of work and city and relationship actually make me stiff and ill.

I was lucky.  I had found the right person, Dan Perin, at the right time, in the aftermath of the post-traumatic stress of three years of anti-war activity in Ohio, and in the right place, Denver  (though 300 miles from Casper, the distance was a blessing as the Casper tensions faded with the miles).  This was the beginning of my recovery from the traumatic stress of three years in the maelstrom of anti-Vietnam War protests at Kent State, and the recent year of coping with the chaos of an oil boom town in Wyoming, a recovery for which I am forever indebted to Dan.  My numerous encounters with Dan and with programs and personalities and workshops he brought to the Whole Life Learning Center--from meditation to acupressure to aura healing to past-life regression--enabled me some three years later to have the clarity and focus of mind and personal mental confidence to once again take up the graduate studies I had dropped out of two years previously.  But in 1974 I had no intention of completing them, for the toll of the stress had destroyed my confidence in the value any sustained intellectual endeavors.  I returned to Kent State in the 1977-78 school year and completed my dissertation and thus my doctoral studies in the Summer of 1980.  Thanks, Dan.

Written and Submitted by Lloyd Agte, Co-Administrator of our InsightandOutsight blog.

Words Have Consequences!

Tucson, Arizona, Saturday, January 8, 2011—It has happened again.  A deranged young man apparently upset with the political views of his representative in Congress, Gabrielle Giffords, shot and seriously wounded her.  Others were killed and wounded.  Anyone who has listened to the radio, watched TV or read a newspaper already knows these preliminary facts.  The “usual” responses by friends, associates and commentators are flooding the communications environment.

I should be angry.  I am far beyond anger.  I am in despair.  I am NOT surprised that this happened, and I don’t believe most of you are either.  Given the incredible lack of sensitivity in the rhetoric to which we are now exposed minute by minute and the disregard for the potential consequences of our words, how could we not expect that such a tragedy would happen?  It has happened before too many times.

When you have such prominent persons as Sarah Palin “tweeting” with images of the crosshairs of a gun sight placed over the locations of politicians whose positions she disagrees with, you are suggesting an action of violence, whether intended or not.  When you have a candidate for the U.S. Senate suggest that “Second Amendment remedies” may be needed if certain politicians do not do as they are told to do, again, violence is the “subtle” suggestion.

When this tragedy was broadcast one of the first things I thought about was an essay I wrote in April of 2009 at the tenth anniversary of the Columbine High School shootings.  The article, “High Noon At the OK Corral,” took issue with the notion that guns had become the tools for dealing with our anger toward persons, policies or actions we did not like.  (The gunfight took place in Tombstone, AZ.)  It was of interest to me that the article alerted government sites that apparently track potential terrorist activity.  Our government knows there is a high level of anxiety and anger brewing in our population.

In an interview, one Arizona Senator said it was “incomprehensible” that such action could happen.  It is my strong opinion that it is NOT incomprehensible that people will do stupid things if they are constantly urged to bear arms, rail against people with whom they disagree and ultimately shoot and kill them!  Why are we surprised?  There are many things we can point to as the causes and all of them contribute some part of whole picture.  In the final analysis, for me, the problem is that we have utterly lost our ability to respect the differences of opinion that exist.  We have become so used to immediate awareness of conditions—via the Internet, TV, and radio—that we also expect immediate resolutions.  And we expect those resolutions to be according to our priorities.  Good heavens!  Are we such spoiled children that we have to have our way about everything?  Is there no room for considering the value of the contributions of others?

What is said by talk show hosts, news networks and demi-gods who present themselves as all-knowing prophets, leads to consequences for which few of them will think they have any responsibility.  It should be abundantly clear by now that the constant, bitter rhetoric is giving some individuals approval to do stupid, harmful things.

Words have consequences!

Getting Beyond “I don’t WANT to.”

A number of weeks ago a friend sent me a saying she liked and thought I might.  It was:

I don’t WANT to,

I don’t HAVE to,

You can’t MAKE me . . .

I’M RETIRED!!!

Maybe it was because it resonated with my frame of mind at the time, but I DID like it.  In fact, I immediately made it into a small poster, printed it and posted it on the wall in front of my computer where I saw it every time I was at the keyboard.

One of the reasons it resonated with me at the time was the fact of the growing discord in our societal “conversations.”  It seemed to me no one was listening to anyone else.  We each were shouting our opinions as though we were the only voice that counted. These were not only the voices of individuals, family members and friends, but also of the media and the politicians. The fact is that they had long since ceased to be “conversations” and were, for the most part, simply diatribes of complaint and finger-pointing.  I definitely didn’t WANT to continue being part of that frustration, but I was!

Then, this morning I received one of those innocuous email forwards.  At first I thought, “Here’s another one!”  The email referred the reader to a blog page, “Confessions of A Confetti Head.”  The first paragraph got me.

Where does REAL personal change come from? You know, the kind that puts you into a tailspin with profound “AHAs.” The kind that after you come back to Earth, you say, “WOW! That was AMAZING!” and from that moment on, you are different. You are different in ways that you may have struggled with for years, or even your entire life.

As I read on I discovered that the author had many degrees, had become certified in many human potential techniques, and yet still felt a distinct schism in her psyche.  With all she knew about living and how well qualified she felt to live life fully, she also “struggled with a dual experience of myself as dynamic and capable on one hand and invisible, unworthy, and less than on the other hand.”   I could also identify with those feelings of a strange inadequacy to really make a difference, to be heard above the din of angry confrontation and lack of civility. Who wants to listen to me?  (Also, who do I want to listen to?)

Personally, I have found myself echoing and believing the “I don’t want to” attitude about life.   What’s the use, I thought.  It is not a pleasant place to be when that is the way one thinks and feels about life.  In that place you feel like a voice crying in the wilderness, hoping the deaf will hear and the blind will see.  They don’t and they won’t as long as we cannot respect and accept our differences.  If this country stands for anything, it is the rights of each of us to be whom we are, and to recognize that right in every other American.  Remember, we ALL came from somewhere else (except for the Native Americans).

Somehow, I thought to myself, I have to get beyond these feelings of not wanting to participate in a world gone crazy.  I cannot hide away in a cave (as much as I would like to at times) and pretend there is nothing to be done, no way to make things better.  I do know I cannot change anyone else.  Great gravy!  It’s almost impossible to change myself.  What in the world makes me think I should even want to try to change anyone else?

I cannot help but remember an experience I had years ago that provided a profound example of what can happen when one decides to change his/her attitude.  I had felt deeply hurt by a situation that occurred.  I felt so angry that I defiantly told myself I didn’t even want to want forgive the other person.  Over a period of time working on that situation I came to a point where I realized I wanted to want to forgive the person.  Finally, I wanted to.  At last, after much work in prayer an objectively discussing the problem with those whose opinions I valued, I did forgive!  In that moment I was totally free from the negative power of the original event.

I wish I could say that overcoming that situation took me beyond ever feeling hurt again or angry and unforgiving.  It didn’t.  Life is not a matter of overcoming one situation and forever being free of challenges.  The most we can expect from meeting a challenge is to understand the process fully enough to use that knowledge to meet subsequent challenges. 

There is only one way, really, to get beyond “I don’t WANT to”.  You have to WANT to.  That is where real personal and societal change will come from.  It is my hope that our society will get beyond the anger and frustration that so many feel.  I suspect that once the midterm elections are over and the politicians have little more to gain from milking the adversity to their advantage that things will settle down for a month or so.  Of course, then the REAL election effort begins and we can return to accusing one party or the other of misleading us, being dishonest, baiting the divisive tendencies in those subject to such efforts and generally further destabilizing our sense of connectedness.  You see where this is going, right?

The Anger Frequency

The following article was written by a long-time friend in response to my posting, Dealing With Anger. Our friendship dates back to the late 1970’s to the Whole Life Learning Center days in Denver, Colorado. (See Lloyd’s bio at the end of the article.) As I mentioned in prefacing my article, people who search Google for various references to “anger” have been directed to my blog and represent about 25% of the new readers, so obviously, there is a need to consider the subject. While this article is longer than my normal postings, please set aside some time to take it in.

By Lloyd Agte

Thanks, Dan, for posting a link to one of your old posts about anger, which I had planned to blog on last year, BUT I WAS TOO ANGRY (only joking). What I wanted to write, and now can, since house-building deadlines are mostly over (read: "ignored"), was that I think we have a "Frequency Of Anger" that the mind sometimes locks onto, just like we have a "Frequency Of Depression" and a "Frequency Of Happiness." Think of the frequencies as on a radio dial. When something makes us angry, we "tune in" to the frequency of anger and thus many of the past angers and frustrations connected with anger emerge, and we are then faced with a litany of anger-making events, which seem to stoke each other and temporarily dominate the landscape of our thoughts.

There is nothing wrong with anger. Sometimes it is good. It is our assertion of a boundary, a way of telling others that they have crossed our line of moral, decent, agreed-upon, expected, etc. behavior. This is how children and students learn boundaries. Parents/teachers set boundaries and are angry when they are violated. Children/students learn to respect the boundaries set by authority and all is relatively harmonious. But if those boundaries are unreasonable, or tyrannically enforced, there will probably be established an anger that may be life-long and most likely hidden or displaced. A control-addict's anger is an overly rigid boundary that probably IS ego driven, and it does great damage to those around him/her. It is a form of emotional abuse like verbal abuse. But, yes, Dan, you are correct in saying that we are taught not to have anger. So that when we do have anger we feel guilty and suppress it. Frequently children are denied their right to anger, often by an angry/controlling parent. We are talking control addiction on the part of an adult here, a compulsive disorder that can and has ruined thousands of lives. So the victim of a control addict's anger probably needs serious help, and of course so does the control addict, but he/she never sees it as a problem. Their ego insecurity is covered over with many layers of compulsive disorder, which they do not see as a problem until (if ever) they crash against the consequences of one or more of their addictions.

And while it is important to come to terms with past unresolved childhood anger, it sometimes is impossible, particularly when the person with whom we are angry is no longer living. Christian forgiveness is one way. But it is also important to dial ourselves off the "Frequency of Anger" so that it is not a closed loop of anger feedback.

Often there is something in our immediate life that is making us angry. It could be another person, or our own behavior, anger with ourselves because we are not doing more, accomplishing a task we have set out for ourselves, or anger at the government or some institution. There are obviously an infinite number of possibilities to cause anger, but the three somewhat arbitrarily listed above seem as good a place as any to start.

In the first case, anger at another person needs to be resolved on a joint (ideally) basis or internally resolved. This, basically, is what Dan writes about so admirably in his blog, so I won't go into it here. But what Dan seems to be saying is that what was assumed to be a resolved issue of anger, emotionally, sometimes crops up as a full heat of unresolved anger. This suggests that there is something behind the incident that may or may not be the fault of the other person. We are blindsided with the surprise attack of anger. Do we need to exercise Christian forgiveness, seek revenge, beat on a pillow, or nurse our anger so that we don't fall into the same trap with someone else in a similar circumstance in the future? But we do need to do something to keep the anger from debilitating our daily functioning and from starting the anger feedback loop. So writing down the reason for the anger would be a good start, then dial in another frequency and forget about it. And if it won't go away, set aside a certain time of the day, say from 12:00 to 12:10 every day and just be mad as hell about it and work up all that anger and imagine revenge, and whatever, but then at 12:11, shut it off and go on about your daily life until 12:00 the next day. I call this "programmed anger frequency."

In the second case, anger at ourselves, we should probably first stop what we are doing and do something else for a time. There is a thin line between frustration and anger. The can opener won't work right. The sink is plugged. The weather is terrible. As in most cases, anger is not a solution, only an expression of our belief that the world should maintain itself to our liking at all times. This is where we need to take a breath and "tune out" the frequency of anger. Anger can be a learned habit, just like turning on a radio set to a certain frequency every day. We hear that small spectrum of information on that particular station and nothing else. It sounds stupid, I know, but singing the song "Whistle while you work" (or whistling it) can give some humorous perspective to our conditioned-anger response. Also time for meditation, relaxation, physical workout, walk, whatever. The world will not stop if the house is not spotless for the party, the dog will probably wreck another screen door and the kids will not behave in the future, either. And most likely we have started objectifying the world around us: it's the crap "out there" that is the source of the problem. I call this "dial another frequency."

Anger at ourselves for not living up to our own self-imposed goals is something only we can resolve. But doing something else for a time, taking a vacation, practicing meditation, socializing, and so on is needed to break the bonds of burnout. In my own case, I have been building a house for over three years, and when I find that I have what I call "a very short fuse," and start yanking cords, kicking stuff out of the way, I know that it is time to stop for a while, at least clean up the work areas, and perhaps change tasks for a time. In all of these three examples, at the height of frustration and anger, many (it seems like ALL sometimes) the past frustrations and angers connected with building, with teaching, with being a student, all of which have high personal expectations we set for ourselves come to the fore. And even personal relationships, (the clumsy, awkward, or failed ones of course) in the past keep trying to spring to mind, and I realize that I am on the Frequency Of Anger and that I must break it before I destroy something, either through inattention or deliberately through anger. I say to myself, "Let that go for now." And I will be the first to admit that it is easier said than done. Robert Persig's novel "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" is valuable in showing how one needs to become one with what one is working on to produce quality. When we become angry it is often at something "out there" and as we are all directly connected with everything in the universe, it is "in here" simultaneously. I call this "tune in to the frequency of self."

Anger at the government, employer, any institution is probably best resolved through direct political action. We are still, at least in theory, a government of the people, by the people and for the people. It is a lot of work to change any large institution, but working with others to change it produces less destructive anger than the slow burn of feeling hopelessly victimized by it day after day. Unfortunately there is at present a fairly substantial body of people occupying the right wing of our political system that seem to be daily consumed with anger to the point of vitriolic hatred. They are angry at the political system, angry at the President, at immigrants, at various if not all races, at welfare, at "liberals," at young people. Were they to become engaged in some aspect of the political process, they would have to tune out the anger frequency long enough to turn their position into constructive legislation (at least from their perspective) and in the process the issues angering them could be debated in a give-and-take exchange. This would be democracy in action rather than hatred in emails and bumper stickers. This would be much more beneficial to them personally and to society than passing on hate-filled emails, which feeds anger in its feedback loop but does little else. I call this "create a new frequency."

The "Frequency" theory also works with depression. Waking up in the night depressed, lying in bed thinking about a depressing situation often brings up the ghost of depressions past and the feedback loop starts again. This could have a physiological cause, such as low blood sugar, which releases adrenaline and gives us fight-or-flight (and both sometimes) nightmares, which can be temporarily relieved through raiding the refrigerator at midnight and eating slow release sugars such as in carrots (my technique), and waiting for the blood sugar to come up in 20 minutes or so. But in any case those depression causing events of the past won't get resolved during a sleepless night, so best to jot down the depressing "events" on paper or in a journal and work on them after a good night's sleep. Probably the next morning when the depression or anger frequency is tuned out, some will seem silly to be concerned about. Same with anger. Lying awake with anger or sleeping with anger is a debilitating stress on the system, which is rarely productive. Throwing open the window, as in the '80s movie "Broadcast News," and shouting "I'm sick and tired and I'm not going to take it any more" is healthy because the true self has found honest expression, but it probably won't do as much good as sitting down and writing down a list of "Why I am so damned mad" and then doing something about some of the key items on the list. With the anger objectified on a list, solutions can start and the cognitive brain can take over from the frequency of the emotional brain (not scientific, I know, but then I never claimed to be a scientist).

We cannot totally stop the mind from thinking what it wants to think, which is probably the best thing and worst thing about the mind. Our unconscious boils up in our sleep and tries to reconcile tensions in our dreams. Many drugs, especially recreational drugs, including alcohol, and all sleep-inducing prescriptions and over-the-counter sleep drugs, depress Delta sleep, the few minutes of time when we actively dream, every 90 minutes or so throughout the night. (I recently saw this disputed on TV, saying that "maybe" we dream all the time and only remember when we wake up after Delta sleep, but as the brain waves are so radically different during Delta sleep, I hold to my original statement, with deference to an exploration to new studies I need to look at.) In short, to fight anger and depression we need to lead drug-free lives to let out unconscious do its job for us when we have "down time" rather than competing with our waking frustrations during the day.

Anger is part of the human condition. Wrath, one of the Seven Deadly Sins listed by Pope Gregory the Great in the 6th century, is something each of us has to learn to manage. Limited forms of the Deadly Sins of Pride, Avarice, and Envy are actually ENCOURAGED by our society as engines of a vibrant Capitalist economic system. But an excess of them results in our current economic collapse and depression. So too is limited anger a healthy reaction to social buffeting dealt out to us in every day life. (If enough of us get angry at the rude driver, he may change his ways--and then he may shoot us, too). But in excess, anger is destructive to ourselves and others, and we need to learn to recognize it as a problem to be solved or a frequency we need to manage, dial away from, or find a substitute for in order for us to get on with our creative life.

--Lloyd Agte
After graduating high school in Plummer Idaho, birthplace, worked at Boeing in Seattle for three years as a Final Assembly Inspector before attending University of Idaho, graduating with a B.A. English, 1964, � Received an M.A. at Sul Ross University, Texas in 1966, then taught as an Instructor at the University of Wyoming until 1968, married during this time. �Attended Kent State University, Ohio as Graduate Student and Teaching Fellow until 1972. �Worked as a carpenter in Lewiston Idaho, summer and fall of 1972, toured Mexico spring of 1973 and began teaching at Casper College in fall of 1973. �Awarded Ph.D in English 1980, continued teaching English, Film Studies, Video Production, and Multi-Media Production at Casper College and University of Wyoming Extension at Casper College until retirement in 2004. �Divorced in 1990 and remarried in 1996. �Currently living with wife Barbara Joe in a home that we have been building since 2005.

Promises

While thumbing through the books in my library looking for something seasonal to read, I found something I placed within the pages of a special book awhile back. The book is, Anger, by Thich Nhat Hanh. What I found was a flattened foil Dove chocolate candy wrapper. On the inside of the wrapper were the words:

Keep the promises you make to yourself.

The wrapper was serving as a bookmark for the chapter entitled, Putting Out the Fire of Anger. I think I have learned through the years something about the serendipity of events. I was struck by the fact that I had just experienced a situation about the fire of anger being put out, at least from the former size of the blaze. That led me to thinking about how at times something that has angered us, or someone we care about, had been silently forgotten. Then, almost by chance, we discover it again in its new state of being.

This note, serving as the bookmark, reminded me of a past anger I had held that was quite deep. At the time the event occurred I promised myself I would not get into a situation like that again. I had worked to clear the negative emotions and to do outwardly what I could to put out the fire. When anger comes about between two or more persons, that fire may not really be out and the atmosphere cleared and ready for rebuilding until the parties can meet and come to understand how to proceed. In some cases only one party to the event will make the effort.

Promising not to get into such a situation again is almost pointless if one does not really resolve the conditions that brought out the anger in the first place. It is not so much a matter of what the other person does or does not do. It is a matter of what you do. You cannot control the behavior of another person. Trying to get them to change what they are doing could only make things worse. And we kid ourselves if we think that trying to make them feel guilty will have any positive effect on us. Our job is to change our own attitude by examining how we might have acted differently in the situation. Then our promise to ourselves includes not making the same mistakes again. It may also include resolving to be more sensitive to what is actually happening in a situation. If the other person comes forward in an attempt at resolution that is “frosting on the cake.” Relish the occasion and do whatever it takes to keep the promises you make to yourself, to put out the fire of anger.

Unresolved Anger

As I lay semi-conscious before falling asleep I suddenly found myself in a fantasy dialogue with a friend to whom I had long ago sent an article having to do with the interpretation of some ancient scrolls that had finally been deciphered. The friend wrote back with a point-by-point debate about the findings. I thought at the time, “Okay, so you have a different opinion about the matter,” and I let it go.

Then the old “feel-o-meter” began to hit the red zone in my fantasy dialogue. My response to my friend went something like this, “Wait a minute! I wasn’t asking for a debate on Biblical authenticity. I just thought you would be interested in the article. You don’t have to prove your scholarship to me, and I sure as hell don’t have to prove mine to you!”

Bam! There it was. Strong feelings of anger that I didn’t even know I had about a long past situation. Obviously I had a “load” about his dismissal of my effort to share something I thought would be of interest. Frankly, I was a bit taken aback that I had these strong feelings of anger, especially since the experience was a number of years ago and I had not thought of it since. This is a great example of how the “little foxes spoil the vines,” as Jesus pointed out in a parable.

I would not suggest that we necessarily dig around in our subconscious looking for slights that we may have experienced in the past or suppressed anger. However, I certainly encourage examining such feelings when they do surface. As long as we do not face the reality of hidden, suppressed anger, it will slowly eat away at our very being. We may find ourselves expressing strong feelings that are out of proportion to a current situation but which are the release of those pent up past experiences.

When such feelings surface, it is time to consciously acknowledge them and seek to replace them with forgiveness, where necessary, and love for and acceptance of each person’s individuality. If you find your “feel-o-meter” hitting the red zone apparently out of the blue, consider it a blessing that has come to you so you can finish up the unresolved anger. This is part of learning to let it go!