Letting out rage without killing

Anger is an untamed beast inside us. Does it change with age when wisdom and reason dominate over rage and violence? Many people experience in their later years a mellowing in the way they express anger, resentment, protest, denial and discontent caused by a betrayal of trust and trespassing over one's sense of integrity.

To get angry is to lose one's temper. One can be short-tempered or even-tempered depending upon the degree of violation one perceives in the hand of the offending party. The worst kind of anger and the one that hurts the most like the instant piercing of a dagger is the one that comes from persons we love the most. In other words, the more one loves a person, the more painful it is to release anger.

I cannot count the number of times I have been angry and have lost my temper to the point of wanting to murder the object of my hatred. The more intense one loves, the greater the explosion of anger and grief that comes and the expression is often self-destructive. I have been angry when I thought that my innocence over some things was violated. There was a time in my young life when falling in love was an end in itself. But then I discovered that the object of my great love had feet of clay, that shattered my belief in love itself. So I learned that love is not immortal and words of affection can turn into acts of anger.

Outside the realm of the heart where anger can strike deepest, work is an open arena for conflict and confrontation. The more stress one meets in one's work, the easier it is to explode in anger. In the field of journalism where the most unpredictable situations can take place, it is a daily bread to lose temper with almost anything, from bad traffic to boring press conferences. At the end of the day when you thought you had written your best news report, your editor comes back with a copy you hardly recognise was yours originally. So, you succumb to curses from the typewriter to the nearest bar. ( Yes, in those times there were no computers which meant that you did not have to bribe a hacker to spread virus in your own editorial office.)

There are small and big things that provoke us everyday into a mood of rage. Living in Sweden may have tamed the beast in me because it is the Swedish norm of life to be average ( lagom ) in all forms of expressions and actions, average in wealth, in intelligence, in looks, in consumption, in emotions - in literally everything. Anything excessive is social taboo. But, I have realised that instead of becoming angry over certain things - where I have little power to control or change, I end up being indifferent and feeling totally divorced from the situation itself.

A dangerous place to find oneself , this place of apathy because we cease to be members of a society where our voices and our choices, no matter how self-motivated still count in the collective world we live in. If there is anything that truly tames the beast in anger it is most probably the feeling of being a part of something whole, somewhere safe for the heart to take refuge when the going gets rougher. #