Flashbacks of exploding in anger sometimes visit my conscious self. It’s embarrassing now. How frustrations or deep hurts overflowed into words and actions.
I could say that we live in an age of the angry young man where everyone is like that. Politicians around the world seem to be tapping into that anger. Except that angry young men have been around for decades—millennia even. Billy Joel released a song in 1976 described as a sardonic look at “the angry young man who will go to his grave as an angry old man.”
Maybe I lost the edge of that anger when I became 25 or so and my brain finished growing (biological fact, in case you missed that in class). Or maybe years of meditation. Or maybe the times, especially in business, where I was metaphorically stabbed in the back by colleagues or friends, and I realized in the bigger picture, I was better off gone from that environment.
Looking at that bigger picture, would you like the vision of yourself as one of those angry old men (or women)? No one around you? Doing nothing for the family or community? Probably taking years from your life?
I can’t imagine that a person exists who doesn’t experience something sometime that lights a torch inside. A mark of maturity and growing spiritual awareness is revealed when we can let it go. Quickly. Before we say or do something foolish. Hitting that internal pause button before we hit the keyboard return button that will send that email or publish to social media.
How about if we go to our graves known as kind and compassionate rather than angry and bitter? We can do that. It does take work. And time.
Faith Venture 
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