I still don’t get it. I do not understand the meanness and spite with which some people operate in their everyday lives and work. I’m still surprised when greed, jealousy, and the need for control motivate actions, especially in people who have outwardly devoted their lives to helping others. I keep forgetting that baser emotions are not exclusive to the profit-driven world ofcommerce, but can exist everywhere.
Bureaucratic bumbling and ineptitude I have come to expect, but vicious personal action against someone whose personal integrity has never been questioned, still sets off skyrockets in my brain. Sometimes I need to talk with Terry, my husband, and get perspective, when all I feel is a throbbing need to tear someone’s throat out for hurting a person I care for.
However, even when I feel anger driving my own thoughts, I don’t usually want to act on that feeling. While revenge fantasies are definitely at the front of my brain at times like these, I think long and hard about my responses before taking action. Like my husband, Terry, I agree that acting in anger diminishes me and often only closes doors that I might want open in the future. The need for retribution only springs from those baser emotions, a foul harvest, indeed. A rabbit hole down which I don't want to travel.
I used to teach my students that the only thing in the world you can really control is your own reaction to things, to others, to words. It’s never easy to take the high road when others so obviously wrong you. It does, however, usually pay off in ways we can only dimly see as we gaze down the road. At the very least it keeps my blood pressure from causing physical havoc, and forces me to count the many blessings of the life I do have—all of which, both people and a few things, have been carefully gathered over decades of careful living. And as for those whose acts have caused, and will continue to cause such pain and anxiety—there’s a part of me that knows the idea of karma is rooted in millennia of experience. What goes around will very likely come around for them. And if it doesn’t, they are too small in spiri
t to waste time worrying about.Those of us injured by them will have long since moved on. “Way will open,” as my Quaker friends used to say.
