Anger Games

(6-minute read) – The fool on the beach thought this was the anger games. He still looked at me, daring to think he was my equal. His friends seemed to think so too. Birds of a feather.

Anger and pride coursed through my veins like a drug. I knew no one could touch me as I soared on an ego rush. Definitely not this over-confident boy trying to be a warrior in front of his flock.

He swaggered closer to me with his chest puffed out. Every word of his body language shouting out: “Beware! Severe aggression.” He came a bit closer still. Wait, wait, wait… then just as he was close enough, I snapped my head forward at him and felt my skull rupture his stupid nose.

He dropped to his knees cupping his bloody nose, groaning, “It’s broken. It’s broken”. I knew it was. I heard the crack so loud I thought it was my skull fracturing.

There was no fight in him. His ego was not equal to my inflamed and powerful specimen.

I stood cocked for more on my violent high. I stared at his friends and bade them, “Come on!” But they saw the look in my eye. They had fallen silent. Their courage had taken flight at the sight of their slain warrior leader. And the sight of my power.

I had experienced this power a few times before in those days of my youth. I loved that untouchable high, that ego dominance, when I was younger .

But more and more I’d learnt that there was a remorseful comedown once my ego subsided. Once the drug was out of me, something sad and calm would come over me. In between the drugs, my soul would cry out, “What have I done?” Those cries were how I developed control and compassion, kicking and screaming against my brash ego.

That day on the beach the comedown was severe and instantaneous. As I watched, he bled. And as I walked away, I wept with remorse. I wept for the pain and humiliation I’d caused him. I wept because that exhilarating high I was on was gone for the last time. That part of me died.

The boy on the beach healed me as he looked up from his broken face. I saw the look in his eyes. It wasn’t fear. It was shock.

That day marked the start of my recovery from the drugs of anger and pride. Those armors of the ego are never totally gone, and sometimes I still miss the feeling of invincibility they gave me. Like all addictions, the lure of violence lurks, but I’m conscious of it and I’m in control. Now my ego rushes are infrequent and mild. Control and compassion are my baselines.

The vulnerability of compassion is where I belong, moved by the pain and the suffering I see and I cause. Not untouchable behind a cold armor nor dulled to the beauty of my soft heart by the drug of the ego. Not falsely pumped up by my sense of self, only to be deflated and depressed, when my delusional glory has passed.

From my fleeting untouchable violence, which once I thought I loved so much, I was saved by a man on his knees. He was shocked by my violence. For a moment I loved it. Then I despised it. And that was his lesson.

I knew right there and then I would never again be unmoved by violence and I would never again glorify myself and my untouchable anger.

I would see violence like the man on his knees… shocking. So shocking that I would stop in my tracks and cast out that drug before it took hold. I would break free. Again and again.

No matter what, there would be no violence in me. I would reject my ego with its false promises of glory and rest in the calm, and forgive and forget.

Years later I walked on that same beach. The fresh, damp molecules of air came to rest on my face from their unknown origin over the sea. My ten year-old son ran ahead of me. I had already suspected that same drug in him waiting to feed off life’s murky temptations. As I watched him, hoping he would never be destroyed by it, he kicked his ball a little too close to a man and a women relaxing nearby.

The man stood up and approached my son. He pushed my son to the ground, shoved his forearm in his neck and pinned him there, shouting words and spittle down on him in the sun.

Suddenly the drug that I’d rejected for so many years came to course through my veins again like a good old friend. And I was so happy to have my old friend visiting. Just one more time. It shot me into action like a first-time high. Every muscle in my body orchestrated my super-human flight across the sodden sea-sand toward the man.

The man still had my son pinned down. On that lovely soft sand, he never heard me coming.

In the seconds it took to get to him, I saw my left shin slicing through the air in its punting arc and bisecting his rib-cage with all the momentum of my flying ninety-kilogram body behind it. I saw him lifting into the air off my son and landing two metres away, with me standing over him. I saw him writhing and groaning in pain in the sand and wind, and his girlfriend screaming, “Please stop.” I saw the expression of fear in his eyes.

Then I let the madness go.

I reached them and pulled him off my son. He stumbled and fell to the sand. I breathed and felt calmness and control restored. His girlfriend helped him up as she rebuked him and slapped him on his shoulder. I stood staring at them, as she turned to my son and said, “Are you okay? I’m so sorry.”

She was still muttering apologies as they slithered off. I watched them go and realised the man had done his relationship with her a great disservice. His violence had not been anything glorious to behold. It had been a cowardly projection of something else that was wrong in his life or in their relationship. Violence always was.

I turned to my son who was standing wide-eyed behind me and said, “Boy, always keep your anger under control. But when you see injustice, let it out just enough to fight for justice.”

He looked shaken and emotional. He whimpered, “I wish you’d hit that guy. You should have kicked him right off me and broken his ribs, Dad.”

Funny that he wished exactly what I’d pictured myself doing just minutes before but I was glad I’d controlled myself. I knew my son’s bruised ego was talking.

“That would have made me a silly bully like him, boy.”

I checked his neck and hugged him. He was crying in frustration now as he softened to my nurturing.

My son asked, as we walked back to the hotel together, “How did you get to me so fast, Dad?”

“My love for you gave me super-human strength, my boy. An angry part of me wanted to fly into him and smash him off you. But something inside me stopped me – my love for you was greater than the anger.”

I knew the difference between the rampaging anger of an out-of-control ego and justified anger tempered by immediate mindful control. I had learnt to instantaneously refer my emotions inward to my centre where I was free of the tyranny of egotistical emotions.

My son was too young to understand all this. Like me, he would have to walk his own path to learn the difference between egotistical anger and mindful, appropriate action. He would have to learn the difference between anger as a selfish addiction and anger as a virtuous advocate for justice.

And he would have to learn that violence was never an option, not under any circumstances at all. Or at least he would have to wrestle with whether it was ever called for. I still had some wrestling to do. I don’t know what I would have done if the man still wanted to fight. He would have forced me to fight to defend my son.

And therein lies the tragedy of the human condition. We live in a world of the physical, ego-dominated realm. Any yearnings to elevate ourselves above this realm are repeatedly frustrated. But we keep trying because there’s a beckoning inside us to be better.

And then one day we all die and leave this frustrating realm behind… and we come to understand the true eternal beauty of control and compassion. That, surely, must be heaven – free of anger games.

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