I'm mostly a very calm person. I rarely raise my voice. I'm a human and I do experience anger and frustration at times, when things don't go as expected. But I usually tend to brew the anger within and not blow it out or shout at others (It's a different story during PMS days, I admit! The Chandramukhi in me comes out all of a sudden ;-)).
This morning, I had to engage in a difficult conversation and needed to assert my thoughts. I could literally feel that I was invoking anger within in order to assert my voice.
As I looked back on the conversation, the chapter from the book "The courage to be disliked" came right in front of my eyes. I had a goal - "Convey how I felt about a situation" and I used anger as a tool to achieve that goal. Could I have conveyed the same, without anger? Possibly, but it wouldn't have had the same effect.
What triggered the goal in the first place? That the situation I had been put through was unfair. Even though the opposite party apologised and admitted that they were wrong, I couldn't bear the unfairness that I was subjected to.
As I explored what triggered me in the past, I could see a pattern emerging - in situations where I expect fairness and I don't receive it, it angers me quite a bit. The chapter on Fairness from the book "Finding awareness" gave me some consolation. "Life is not fair or unfair, it is simply indifferent."
While we go through this thought - "Life is unfair to us", the suffering we face makes us feel isolated. As the author Amit Pagedar says, "We are blinded by our pain to such a degree that we forget to notice how everyone around us is suffering too."
I'll be referring to these two books often, as they have come to my life at the right time and are helping me process my thoughts and emotions.
Going deeper and just observing ourselves without judging, criticizing, analyzing or problem solving is all that is required. The resulting self-awareness will provide the answers we need.
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