The enormous green rage monster

This is your burden to bear.

I typically tend to blog about the stages of life in a chronological fashion, but today is about an aspect of everyone’s existence that is rather recurrent and not anchored to a specific age. As I type this, I feel an inexplicable rage radiating from every pore of my body, and I almost expect to see my skin take on a greenish hue. No, I’m not hulking out, but I’m nevertheless angry. I’m not too sure where it’s coming from, since I was all smiles just a few hours ago. My diagnosis is that it stems not just from one single element, but a whole host of things happening simultaneously. Sometimes we try to forget and bury the responsibilities we face, but a single provocative thought will suffice for the resurfacing of our daily challenges despite the barriers we hide behind. It’s this fantastic chaos that unleashes the beast within and raises our temper. I find that as a senior in high school, the stress of performing well on examinations for admission to university or for a better scholarship has a certain leverage. Now, couple that with extracurricular obligations, work and personal problems, and you may begin to feel as though the weight of the world is burdening your shoulders. The anger kicks in when you’re doing your best to cope, and the universe decides to keep piling it on. This fury is pretty unhealthy and tends to be a weapon of self-destruction.

There is another kind of anger that is born from resentment, jealousy, and outright hatred. It could be that you extremely dislike a manager, co-worker, teacher, classmate, or it might not even be a single individual. You may be infuriated by the ineptitudes of your phone, your internet provider, your insurance company, the infrastructure of your government, the international justice system, or world issues that need to be addresses but haven’t been (that escalated quickly). In a few days I will be travelling to Ecuador, where I will spend 10 days living among under-privileged citizens of the country. Already I have educated myself on the difficulties

Righteous anger breaks barriers.

those people face daily, challenges we in first-world countries ignore as they have been overcome. The things we take for granted, like a plastic water bottle spilling over the floor, has significance to the Ecuadorians that we will never appreciate. When my blood boils because of this injustice, that passionate rage gives me the strength and the resilience to take on every obstacle that clutters my path, and then some. I've discussed enzymes that catalyze change, and so far, I've never encountered one as effective as righteous anger. It transforms you and everything around you so well because it enables you to do what you know, deep down, is right.

As each of us knows, it doesn't often take much to make us mad; a single spark tends to work us up. That anger can make us violent and destructive, or dedicated and productive. Everything is dependent upon the outlet through which we express ourselves. Ra’s al Ghul from the 2005 movie Batman Begins had many quotable statements, but none as illuminating as this: "Your anger gives you great power. But if you let it, it will destroy you".1 If we learn to control our anger instead of it being the other way around; if we do not let it get the better of us, we will be a step closer to becoming the greatest version of ourselves.

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References: 

1 Quote from Batman Begins