It’s Okay to be Angry
And it’s okay to be human
Sawubona.
It’s not fair.
Of course it’s not.
My life is on hold. My mother died. I can’t get to school. I can’t work. I’m stuck here in Vietnam and can’t get home. I can’t get medical care for things that hurt.
The list is endless. Whatever aspect or aspects of your life have been shut down, it doesn’t seem fair.
This morning, just before I did a trash run, I read a piece by my OR nurse buddy Ann Litts:
Ann was seconds away from a well-deserved retirement. Now she is immersed with case work. Locked in her home, and 700 miles away from someone she cares more about every single day, to say nothing of the grandkids.
It’s not fair.
Of course it isn’t fair.
Nor is it fair to watch your colleagues sicken and die, in the service of those who are ill.
Nor is it fair that those doing the most work get the least respect, the least protection and the least money, from grocery workers to Amazon warehouse people and drivers….I could go on and on.
Those of us over sixty, and Ann is among them, are horrified that our parents are almost literally treated as garbage, castoffs and detritus, piled like rotting cords of wood into side rooms at our nursing homes:
It’s not fair.
Of course it isn’t fair.
I’m working with some African companies which are hard at work trying their best to inform, educate and prepare their employees on Covid, amid denial and brutish ignorance on the part of officials far more interested in their voting base and power than the health of those same voters.
It’s not fair.
Of course it isn’t.
With monies limited and donations down, some of those same conservation companies which have worked endlessly to help rhinos recover may well be overwhelmed with poachers. Because bad people take advantage the same way our Administration is taking advantage of these Conditions to push through anti-environmental drilling opportunities. Of course they are.
It’s not fair.
Of course it’s not fair.
And so many of us feel so helpless, for good reason. We can’t rise up and FIX THINGS.
I particularly liked this line from Ann’s piece:
I am attached. Very attached to a certain future, it seems.
All of us have deep attachments. Not only to the future that we’d hoped and planned for, but a world in which those we loved didn’t sicken and die. Where we could go to college or sell a house and move and do all the things we feel are our right to be able to freely do. Where the animals of the world aren’t wiped out by evil people. It’s endless.
Some respond to this unfairness by taking what isn’t theirs to take: other’s safety. Other’s lives and their families lives and their children’s lives.
That attachment to entitlement has, in fact, turned a great many people into mass murders. Without any AK-47s, as it were. But murderers nonetheless. And crippled many more who, while they survived, now have severe physical limitations.
The rules don’t apply to me is the new weapon of choice for people who kill without conscience, just to party on the beach, flip the bird at inevitability, and party hardy one more time. Who in effect argue that money is more important than people.
Let’s take hundreds if not thousands with us, shall we? Why not. It’s not fair.
I’m OWED.
Um. No, you’re not. None of us is owed anything. Hard truth.
What do you do with the anger?
Back to Ann’s piece:
And yet — to survive. To get past anger. To get to the root of all the emotions — I know I must let go of ALL attachments. Every. Single. Attachment. To any kind of vision of the future. To any belief of any kind.
When we form attachments- to people, to things- to a way of being- when those are threatened, lost or in some way ripped away from us, we suffer. Sometimes terribly.
Attachment to youth and beauty. A way of life. People. A promised future. Love. A retirement fund. Hope. Pain relief.
Doesn’t matter. Attachments define us. They also cost us.
Anger, pain, resentment.
It’s not fair.
Of course it isn’t.
But only if you and I, and Ann and all the others in your world and mine, cannot release those attachments.
Of course it’s hard. Of course it hurts. Of course it takes courage.
We might even have to let go of our attachment to what we think is fair. Or just. Or right.
For what is indeed fair is not for us to dictate. Forces far stronger than we are have always worked their magic and their mayhem. The human interpretation of those forces has little to do with what’s right for the planet. Or for that matter, a much larger Cosmos.
In so many ways we are defined by our attachments: to a place, a garden, a memory, our work, our monumental self-importance.
Remove those attachments, and what are we, really?
It is ours to find out:
“Courage is the price that life exacts for granting peace.
The soul that knows it not, knows no release from little things.
Knows not the vivid loneliness of fear nor mountain heights where bitter joy can hear the sound of wings.
How can life grant us boon of living, compensate for dull gray ugliness and pregnant hate, unless we dare the soul’s dominion?
Each time we make a choice, we pay with courage to behold the restless day and count it fair.”
-Amelia Earhart
The Colorado sun slowly rises on another restless day. Whatever I see, or feel, or embrace, whatever I lose or forgive or have to let go of that is most dear to me, it is up to me to find a way to count it fair.