Taking the Suffering Seriously :: How It Makes Us Angry

Rocky ground.

When I began to realize at age 19 that my entire reality was rooted in faulty and harmful premises (of which what I wrote yesterday was just one), I got angry. 

Like, really angry. Super angry.

Not to mention completely disoriented. If what I’d oriented my entire reality to believe about myself, God, relationships, and the world was not really true, what was?

Commence downward spiral. Freefall.

It’s not just that solitary moments in our lives harm us. It’s that they shift entire realities. What happened in that one moment — or moments — hurt. But as we explored yesterday, they carry the capacity to form the way we live from that point forward. 

And when you get to the moment of reckoning — that moment of realizing just how great a life-altering impact that one moment or string of moments made — it’s like kryptonite. We have the potential to spontaneously combust. 

Because what are our lives, really? They’re just an illusion, we realize.

We’ve based every waking moment upon premises about ourselves and the world around us that are not true. And that leads, justifiably, to anger. 

Everything that happens is perfect? Hold on just one second with that presumptuous and unfeeling assertion, we protest.

Okay. We’ll hold on.

That’s why this is an exploration, not an answers lab.

How has your suffering led to anger in your life?