A Few Guidelines

I think there must be something about my face that makes strangers want to give me unsolicited advice. Advice about the housing market, stocks, careers, marriage, children, how close to live to your parents, whether sun screen is killing us or saving us, and so on. Maybe it's the age I am. Maybe I remind these people of themselves when they were making these choices. Maybe they just go around telling everyone what to do with their lives.

Maybe it's my face.

Maybe I look like I am looking for something and straining to put the pieces together. Maybe I look like I need help. All of those things are probably true in different degrees.

To filter through all of this advice, I'm developing some guidelines or rules or clarifiers. The first is this: I do not take advice from people who have walked the path that they suggest and are still unhappy. If the path leads only to money or ambition or some kind of success that does not include the health of their person and their family, it's not where I want to go. There are a lot of unhappy people giving out advice trying to prove that they've succeeded despite how they feel. And maybe they have. But it's not where I want to be.

The second guideline is to avoid the advice of those who do not ask questions. If they were concerned about my well-being, they would ask. And I have learned not to trust the advice of those who are giving it for their own well-being only.

I think there will be more, but this is what I've decided so far.

These past few years I have burned and burned but have not been consumed. I have asked God for release but He tells me to listen, to sit with my anger for as long as it will sit with me.

I have been afraid to listen to anger, have hesitated to accept it, and struggled to love the parts of myself that burn and burn. But I slowly I am seeing why the metaphor of fire is never far from anger. No two things in my life have shown me how closely life and death are knit together, destruction and renewal.

So I choose anger. Everyday. I choose it again and again. But not as a thing which I love and hold tightly to. Instead, I choose not to ignore or banish it. I choose to lock eyes with its lynx like face, to sit in silence hoping it passes but doing nothing to chase it away, to observe as much as I can about its presence.

In this way, I have learned that the first two purposes of anger are to say “you have been well and truly wronged. This should not have happened but has.” And again to repeat “you are hurt more than you know. Your mind and spirit have been torn apart. You must stop, rest, protect what is left of yourself.” 

 

Of all the things that have soothed the pain that my anger guards, I did not expect poetry to top the list. But there is nothing so calming as finding that someone else can name the flames in your fire, someone else has fallen off of the mountain top of their innocence with only questions to break their fall, someone else is guarding a pain that is healing at glacial speed. And that someone is still out there fighting. When I find a poem that resonates, I can hear the coals of my heart hiss with the relief of water. See, I don’t want to be angry. But even more than that, I don’t want to hurt anymore. And I know my anger is protecting me until I’m ready to fight again.

 

Some kinds of pain can’t be healed in isolation because isolation was the tool they used to hurt you in the first place. But a poem can build a bridge and send just a little rain. Even though the poet is describing their personal hell, it’s also a rebellious love letter to all the warriors out there still fighting. We exist. We fight today and we’ll heal soon. Because we haven’t given up yet. And it is our anger that guards against despair. With psalms and poems we will heal. Some days, I don't know if I will ever wake up truly without my anger, but I'm learning not to be afraid. And as I learn, I worry less about getting rid of my anger and more about listening to it until it has nothing more to say.