June 12
Anger and desire are like mounts: tamed, they carry you far; untamed, they throw you. The art is not to abolish them but to steer them — the heart is master.
The Alchemy of Happiness (freely rendered)
Listening mode
Anger and desire are like mounts: tamed, they carry you far; untamed, they throw you. The art is not to abolish them but to steer them — the heart is master.
Sometimes you only notice in the evening that you were angry. A sentence from a meeting comes back, and with it the reply you didn't give. In the moment itself you kept to the facts. That was probably wise. Still, something has been left lying there that has force in it yet and doesn't know where to go.
A strong feeling has two aspects that are easily confused: its direction and its strength. Anger almost always points at the person standing in front of you. But its strength could go elsewhere too: into a question you ask the next day, or into a line you draw sooner from now on. If you fear only the direction, you often dampen both at once.
The difficulty is that you rarely know the direction in advance. Often it is the anger that first shows you that something matters to you more than you had assumed. You can only steer it once you have felt it, and by then it is already in motion.
The next morning the reply comes back to you. It has grown shorter.
