Surviving the Fury
Mindfulness, fury, and the hard work of not torching my life twice.
Everyone I know is pissed off, worried sick, or just plain worn out. Me too. And if I’m honest, it wouldn’t take much for me to repeat the most spectacular screw-up of my life.
Fortunately for everyone — mostly me — I’ve so far confined my reactions to a couple of chat threads with friends who already know I’m nuts, and to consuming copious amounts of alcohol on the back porch with my long-suffering soulmate. There was a time I lacked even that much self-awareness.
February 2018
Let’s rewind to the halcyon days of 2018. (Since there have been about a bazillion crises since then, I’ll remind you: it was the week of the Parkland school shooting.)
There are three things I despise:
Guns (for reasons of my own I won’t get into here).
Anything that harms a child.
Self-righteous, uninformed pricks (maybe that’s self-loathing at work?).
Parkland hit all three. And in a fit of rage, I posted what we’ll call an ill-advised tweet.
Except I didn’t post it on my own account. No, friends and neighbors, I went full tilt and called the leader of the free world “a fucking tool” on my employer’s account. And my employer just happened to be a government agency.
It took about three and a half minutes for the shit to hit the fan.
I was embarrassed. I was angry. I was scared. I panicked.
So I did what any “normal” person would in that moment: I lied my ass off and blamed “some other dude.”
Thus began the worst 18 hours of my life. The lie couldn’t hold. Everybody was going to know soon enough, and I was most definitely going to lose a very good job in a very public, very ugly way.
By the next day, I confessed. I didn’t just lose a job. I lost the respect of people I admired. I was a laughingstock to a lot more. I embarrassed my employer. I embarrassed my wife. To this day, I don’t know why she didn’t kick me to the curb.
Then and Now
I wish I could say I learned my lesson. But here’s the truth: I could so easily do the exact same thing today. I’m every bit as mad, as crazy, and as impulsive right this second as I was that night in 2018.
What’s different now is this: I’ve learned — just a little — not to let that anger control me.
I’ve learned to pause. To literally take a breath. To remember, in the words of the great philosopher Bono, “It’s just a moment, this time will pass.”
Bhante Gunaratana, in Mindfulness in Plain English, explains it like this: mindfulness means noticing what’s happening in your head without being dragged around by it. Anger isn’t a command. It’s just a wave that rises, lingers, and fades.
Mindfulness isn’t withdrawal. It’s deliberate. It’s action. And it’s damned hard.
I’m no Zen master. I’m barely a half-ass secular Buddhist. But if surviving fury just means pausing long enough not to blow up my life twice, then maybe half-ass is good enough. Give it a try.
I’ve been a nerd most of my life and I love Tolkien and LOTR. The following has been my favorite passage for a long time but I’ve thought of it often in the increasingly depressing last decade. It occurs at a particularly desperate moment toward the end, where Sam is close to losing hope:
There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach. His song in the Tower had been defiance rather than hope; for then he was thinking of himself. Now, for a moment, his own fate, and even his master’s, ceased to trouble him. He crawled back into the brambles and laid himself by Frodo’s side, and putting away all fear he cast himself into a deep untroubled sleep.”
What’s different now is this: I’ve learned — just a little — not to let that anger control me.
I know exactly what you mean.
I like your writing.