Anger Equals Weakness

I heard of the idea before and again on Wed from Jocko. When he was a teenager, 

he thought that a scary angry face was power. "You can lose your temper and 

suddenly you seem to have some extra strength." he remembered thinking "If I can

get the rage thing going and people are afraid of me, that's a positive thing."

 

I would have wholeheartedly agreed when I was a kid. I grew up never being

taught explicitly that anger was weakness. If it was mentioned, the concept was

not fully or convincingly explained to me. Vexation could amount to a foible but 

nothing serious. Instead, the classics I was addicted to, be it the Three Kingdoms

or Journey to the West, often told heroic deeds out of righteous wrath. The

dramatic performance from the master story-tellers on the radio planted the seed

quietly. Being able to rage like my heroes, especially against the injustice of

the world, meant manhood to a pre-teen boy. An obedient son at home and model

student at school, I sometimes admired the "bad" kids who made trouble.

 

At work, doing things against my will felt like having my identity taken away.

I raised my voice a few times, against people that I despised or things I

perceived as unfair. Often, my inability to express myself precisely in English

did not help. "A man curses because he doesn't have the words to say what's on

his mind." said Malcolm X. In the end, the effect was not entirely what I

wanted. I didn't get fired on the spot and, sure, I scared some away, but it 

also made others see me as emotional and difficult to work with.

 

Many of my Indian colleagues, however, handled conflicts cheerfully. They might

not like what is imposed onto them, but they complied with no obvious grudges and

they seemed to have mastered the art of not taking things personally. It looked as

if they had a big picture in mind all the time.

 

At home, temper typically set in within one minute in a disagreement with my

wife. Insecure to begin with, I often cared about her opinions of me and quickly

became defensive and soon things went downhill and ended up as a shouting match.

So much pain over the years.

 

Nowadays I think anger as inability to see the solution with failure to control

emotion and losing temper as a cowardly way out of a predicament. The revelation

came to me late in life (when I stopped believing man beats heaven or 人定胜天) but

I must be thankful that it came after all. I could have lived this life without

conciously doing anything about my anger.

 

Losing temper is NOT sexy. "As soon as I made that connection," recalled Jocko

"I said to himself: this is weak and I'm not going to do it anymore." So won't I.

[7grizzly]

回复 '暖冬cool夏' 的评论 :
Thank you my friend very much for reading and catching the typo. Your thoughts
on the topic are worth the trouble of writing about it. This also reminds me of
Benjamin Franklin. In his autobiography, he listed virtues to reflect on every
day in his private life.

I sure agree that age helps and hope that the next generation better us by
acquiring the insight earlier in life.

[暖冬cool夏]

Very fluently well-written. One small typo: heroes.
Controlling one's temper is harder than one would think. I agree losing temper means we lose, but we are human after all:)), but revelation is definitely a good step. We used to fight a lot too, and what I can tell you now is that age really helps:)