52 WEEKS
Week 6 — Anger
Besides being angry, there’s two things we can be pretty sure about when it comes to people who have road rage.
One… they’re in a hurry.
When we’re driving and we’re not in a hurry, every other driver is a fellow traveler, out enjoying the day. Sometimes we smile or wave.
No, you go first.
But when we’re in a hurry, every other driver on the road is an obstacle, whose sole purpose in life is to get in our way.
I’ll betcha 90% of our bad driving experiences happen because we’re in a hurry.
Is the place we’re going to so amazing, so fantastical, that we suffer every minute we’re not there?
Enjoy the ride, man.
Or maybe we’re not in a hurry? Maybe we just lack patience.
I used to be impatient.
It’s weird, when I was young and had all the time in the world, I had no patience. Everything had to be yesterday. But now that I’m older, and don’t have as much time, I have the patience of Job!
It makes no sense.
I tell ya, if there’s one thing I would give my younger self, it would be patience.
And the second thing we know about “road ragers” is actually the root cause of road rage.
They have a lot of… pent-up frustrations.
Of course, we can’t eliminate everything in our life that frustrates us, but we can keep our frustrations from building up, and becoming ANGER.
Whenever you find yourself getting angry or frustrated, STOP whatever it is you’re doing, and take some deep breaths. Walk away if you can. Take the kettle off the boil.
That’s what smokers do on a smoke break. They think it’s the cigarette that relieves stress, but it’s not. It’s the deep breathing.
They stop what they’re doing, and take a bunch of deep breaths. That’s how you relieve stress!
Also, we need outlets.
Physically, we can try exercise, or sports, or dancing, or punching bags.
Mentally, we can try reading, or music, or meditation, or a nice hot bath… something to give ourselves a calm, peaceful center. Even if we’re not stressed out at the moment.
Remember, it takes longer to boil cold water than hot water.
What we don’t want to do is bottle up our anger and frustration.
Bottle it up and keep it down. Keep it down. Keep it down.
Until finally, BOOM!
It explodes!
And we end up saying and doing a whole bunch of stuff we don’t want to say or do.
Way beyond what was called for because we let it build up.
Sometimes, the person causing our frustration has no idea there’s a problem until we snap and go off on ’em.
Maybe they should have known, but we don’t want to keep it to ourselves until kaboom. That’s not fair, either.
And I’m not saying having anger automatically means we have a problem.
Anger can be an appropriate reaction to injustice, for example, against you or someone you care about. Things that are unfair will make a person angry.
Just don’t let things build up.
Ventilate!
AFTERTHOUGHTS
— Anger is like a bucking bronco. Control it, and we got ourselves a fast and powerful horse. Fail to control it, and we might get kicked in the teeth.
— Anger, love, and desire are the three greatest motivators we have. We should use them!
— Anger can be the fire in our belly. That little extra something that gets us to work those overtime hours, do the extra credit, go the extra mile, and maybe, one day, it’ll help you change the world. As long as YOU are controlling IT.