Jerry stalked into the room. If there is a way that a person can sit down angrily, he had it down pat. After stomping across the floor, he threw his bulk into a chair, wearing the consistent scowl he had practiced for all of our past visits. Where some would offer their anger silently, stubbornly refusing to share anything of value, Jerry was openly, loudly, sometimes eloquently hostile.
He was diligent in showing up. Unfortunately, so far he was the exception that proved Woody Allen’s eighty percent rule. He was rigidly planted in all his original positions on life.
He started the session with a volley of everything that upset him since our last meeting. When he talked, the rest of the group was quiet, cowed by Jerry’s loud, aggressive demeanor and talk. After his opening salvo, he was uncharacteristically quiet for much of the class.
And then he lodged his major complaint, “It’s all we do is talk in here. I don’t wanna talk about any of this shit. I just want a list of what to do. You know, like a checklist or a recipe or something.”
You can see his point. Don’t we all want some sort of recipe for life?
Recipe Books
It seems like there should be one, doesn’t it? It’s occurred to me at different times that it would be really nice to have a recipe book or an instruction manual so that I would know what to do in every situation that comes up. It would be one that if I followed the directions I could predict the outcomes of every situation.
But I’ve never found one. Have you?
The class tried to come up with a ‘how-to’ list for Jerry. All of the techniques were logical and seemed to be much of what we have all been taught about “anger management.”
- Stay calm
- Change your thinking
- Keep a positive attitude
- Walk away
- Tell people how you feel
Once the list was on the board (the class went into more detail than I have listed above), “No one can do that stuff all the time. It’s impossible,” spilled out of Jerry’s mouth.
Exactly. There is no list. There is no quick fix, meal in a minute recipe.
There have been times when I have done everything wrong, took every one of life’s wrong turns, found myself at dead ends, and still, somehow, everything turned out okay.
Other times, I’ve done everything right. Dotted every ‘i,’ crossed every ‘t,’ rubbed my rabbit’s foot, and followed all the rules. And still, somehow, disaster struck.
Sometimes I’ve done the right things or the wrong things and the consequences fit perfectly. Go figure.
Is There a Life Formula?
There might be a formula to follow that will help us live life better, more peacefully, and more effectively, but it isn’t going to be what Jerry sought. There are always going to be those that will tell us that if A happens, and you do B, the outcome will always be C.
I don’t see it as working that way. But don’t believe what I say, go to your own life experiences. Has it been true for you?
No ‘Meals in Minutes’ Answer for Anger
Probably not. It might work if you are the only one involved. To some degree, we can each control what we do as an individual. But if you have to include even one other person, who has his or her own mental model of how life is supposed to work, chances go from slim to none.
The chances of a couple of people’s mental models coinciding exactly are extremely unlikely. The truth is that we all live in separate realities. There is an old story from Japan. It’s called Rashoman. In this story, there is an event that happens that is the basis of the tale. What makes it interesting is that there are (I think) four people that witness what happens and when they each tell the story, it is as if they all witnessed something that is a different story altogether.
Add a couple of more people and the odds against all the gears meshing goes up exponentially.
So there is no ‘meals in minutes’ approach to life. When we buy the idea that there is, we are simply slaves to every evolving circumstance and if it is our emotional tendency, we react in anger.
The Slow Cooker Approach
There might be a way to create our own recipe that can help us to be more flexible in the way we react to life’s challenges. It is one of the key approaches to anger flexibility.
This is a direction based recipe. We add ingredients (usually behaviors) based on how we want to live our lives long term. Stephen Covey is famous for telling us to begin with the end in mind.
When we approach the stew of life that way, we are taking the long view. We step back and decide what we truly value in life. In a sense, we are taking a stand on the principles that are important in life. It’s not always easy to live life this way. It really can be more challenging than taking the path of least resistance.
It is also a way that we can use to slow things down, to give true, heartfelt consideration to how we want to respond to situations even when we are feeling angry. No one can promise you a life without anger, or for that matter, without other strong feelings that are at times comfortable.
But it just might be that if we live life with the long view, we might be able to look back on it and say we did it the right way, the way in which we are true to ourselves and our values.
It’s the slow cooker approach, but might life not be more tender is it is slow cooked?
