How not to get angry

If you are driving and a branch from a tree falls off and blocks your way forcing you to brake suddenly…do you get angry? Of course not….you say it is bad luck or maybe you console yourself that such things don’t happen so often that you have to bothered about it all the time.

But if you are driving again and this time a car suddenly cuts into your lane forcing you to brake suddenly. You get angry. But why? Because this time you are convinced it has to be personal….simply because unlike the branch that is impersonal. This time there is a human being behind the wheel….so it becomes automatically personal….from these two illustrations about how the mind perceives events, we can begin to see the flaw in our thinking.

We get angry because we take things too personally….that is to say we convince ourselves the person who is doing the things they do simply want to bring out the worse in us – when in reality it has absolutely nothing to do with us and even less about making us angry.

Don’t ever take things personally…let it go…once you cultivate this attitude of looking beyond skin, bone and into the mind….you will be less inclined to be judgemental and angry and more understanding.

Be mindful of how your own interpretation of events around you can frequently cause you to get angry unnecessarily spoiling the day for yourself and your loved ones.

Practice this daily and you will find yourself letting go and being less of a slave to anger.

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‘Recently I went out on to lunch with a friend. While we are lunching a mutual friend appeared. He did not even greet us and hardly even paid us any courtesies and just ate his lunch in one corner to which my friend took as a grave insult. He went on and on about the incident all thru lunch and even when we were visiting an estate he was still bitting on the topic like a dog with his fangs firmly set on a bone.

That was when I turned to this fellow and told him – do not take it personally. Please try to understand it is well known to all that you have turned a bountiful harvest that many estate owners can only dream of pulling off on such a difficult year. Not everyone is as lucky as you to have cut all the right moves. He on the otherhand did not have such a happy year. As the weather was not on his side and he even made a few mistakes along the way that came to bite him so very hard that it is unlikely he will have good harvest next year either. So please try to understand when he sees you – it can only remind him of his own failures and that has to be painful as no man wants to beat himself up when he is already down and since you are by nature an inmoderate sort of chap who likes nothing better than for others to pay you compliments all the time. That can be challenging…..so please try to understand it cannot possibly be personal. He is just going thru a very rough patch. Please do not take it personally.

When I shared this with my friend. I could tell that his anger began to dissipate almost immediately. Thereafter he suggested we pay this fellow a visit to cheer him up. To which I considered a most agreeable idea.’