November 4
The best remedy for anger is delay. Do not ask it at the outset to forgive — only to examine: its first onset is violent; if it is made to wait, it subsides.
On Anger II,29 (freely rendered)
Listening mode
The best remedy for anger is delay. Do not ask it at the outset to forgive — only to examine: its first onset is violent; if it is made to wait, it subsides.
Anger has its own sense of time. For it there is only now. If you don't answer at once, the insult seems to stand, as if you had agreed to it.
If you wait anyway, the force is the first thing to ease. In the evening it still sounded like a verdict on a whole person. By morning it has become a single sentence he said, and the tone he said it in. That is less, but more precise.
Only, not everything that eases was wrong. Along with the heat, the justified part sometimes fades too. The cause is still there, but you lack the momentum to raise it, and it seems petty to rake up something you yourself have almost set aside. So delay can turn, without your noticing, into letting it drop.
The examination, then, asks two things: how much of your anger was mere vehemence, and whether you want to stand by the rest even without that vehemence.
The sentence that remains sounds calm. Saying it may cost you more than anything you could have said yesterday.
