I would like to start this blog post with a story written by a wonderful author and self help guru Dan Millman:
Once upon the time, a man was heading homeward, rowing his little boat upstream, when he felt another small boat, heading downstream, collide with his. Since he had the right-of-way, he felt angry. Turning, he yelled at the other boatman, ‘Watch where you’re going! Be more careful!’. The other man apologized, and passed by without further incident.
But an hour later, as the man continued upstream, he felt another boat collide with his. Furious, he turned to scream at this new reckless person - and his anger vanished when he saw that the boat was empty. It must have come loose from its moorings, and drifted into him. Calmly, he pushed it aside and continued on his journey.
He never lost his temper again, because from then on, he treated everyone like an empty boat.
This is a brilliant story which illustrates that anger is a useless feeling as it can not affect what already has happened and can not do any good for the future events. All the feelings we release is a concentrated energy which gets out of us. Depending on the way we feel the energy we release might be neutral, positive or negative. The most important thing is to understand that all the energy flows going from us to outside are manageable just we need to train and learn how to do it.
Don’t misinterpret the story above. Treating everyone like an empty boat does not mean picturing the other people useless or ignoring them. Boat is here a metaphor resembling the negative feelings, in this case – anger. That empty boat which drifted in the river and accidentally hit the man’s boat was something he could not control. The man couldn’t influence the way the river floats to redirect the empty boat away, the same as the empty boat was floating uncontrolled and hit the other boat by accident. What it teaches us is that anger is such a waste of energy than we direct it to things which just happen and can not be changed. A man could shout and swear, releasing his energy through nasty words and it would be such a waste as it would not change the floating of the river or would redirect the boat. Treating everyone like an empty boat means understanding that some thing simply happen whether we want it or not, but just the same as that boat – it passes away. And then we are left alone in the river again until the other boat hits us. It just happens. It is simply the way life is built. So why worry about something you can not change?
You will probably say that anger is something you can not control. And than something pisses you of you simply get angry. However, you are wrong. All the feelings have a rational component and the beauty of being a hommo sapiens is that we understood how to trick and deal with our primitive human nature and how to control it or at least influence it. There are to techniques you can use in order to get rid of anger:
1. To ignore this feeling and little by little eliminate it from your feeling range. It is not easy to do obviously, but everything that is worth achieving requires efforts. Every time you are in the situation when you feel the anger coming – ask yourself, ‘ Is it something I can change? If nothing depends on me in this situation, why do I feel angry and worried? Is it worth?’ Admitting to yourself that actually in some situation you are helpless and powerless will just let all the negative feelings go away.
2. To understand the anger and to admit it. This is a more simple technique on how to deal with the anger. The magic in this one is that as soon as you say something you feel load it just goes away from your chest and the importance you gave to this feeling before simply decreases. So every time than you get angry at a person or at the situation or even at yourself – just say it load,’I am angry at you’, ‘I am angry that this has happened’, ‘I am angry at myself for doing this’. You will see that as soon you say this calmly, saving your energy, the anger will decrease and it will be much easier to go over it.
It is very important to understand that everything takes efforts. As that song says ‘Rome was not built in day’, so is our improvement – it does not happen in a minute. The most important is to have a goal, to see yourself in the stage you want to reach and take small steps towards it. Sometimes it might require to small steps back to make one big step forward. But everything is achievable it only depends how willing you are to work to get it.
