We have all been through that day.

That one day when nothing happens the way it should, when every little moment unfolding feels like some villainous plot against us, when every thing reaches on top of our absolute nerves, making our minds full with abuse, and our brains wanting to blow up entirely. Our tight-fisted hands might look for things to smash or throw around, wanting to punch through the roof of our infuriating reality while we scream our brains out yet not making a beep or a sound.

Just thinking about it makes you angry, doesn’t it? But, on one of those seeming days, I was forced to asked myself “Why?”
“Why do we feel angry? What is it about this emotion that we call “anger” which makes it so powerful and vicious? What actually is anger?”

Every phenomenon in the universe is a result of many individual chain of events which can be quite simple and fundamental in nature, and the emotion we call as “anger” is no different. The base of it all lies in a single word. Expectation. We expect certain things to happen in way they should, we expect certain people to behave in a way they should. And this is the underlying principle of how our minds work. We expect, a lot! Consciously or subconsciously, we end up creating a barrier, a boundary, a red line, faded from above, thickening from below, amidst the darkness which is our minds. This line forms a sort of pedestal upon which all our expectations lie. They may be different for each scenario, maybe different for every person that we know. But, it is undoubtedly present.

And ever so often, things don’t quite fall upon this line rather, they land below it, where the redness is found thickening. And that is where it starts, a whim of irritation at first but, as it gets repeated, the cycle of frustration grows until we are far deep within this red mist. The only way out is up but, we seem to go deeper and deeper in rage, in redness of this anger until all we want is to explode it through countless ways, either harming ourselves or someone coming in our way. But, how to control this? Remove expectations, the thing which started it all, entirely from our minds? Is that even possible?

I am afraid, it is not. So, what can we do then? What is the answer?

Flexibility, is what we can do. The red line, the pedestal of expectations that we created doesn’t necessarily need to be on solid ground. It can be elastic, flexible even. If something doesn’t happen the way we expected it to then instead of cursing all the way, we can go “Okay, at least it happened.” And that is one small example of how we achieve this. Flexibility. For when we find ourselves going deeper into our redness again, there is something which could bounce us right back up, something which shoot us back to our normal red-vacated self. That is how we control our vicious nature. That is how we end up not harming either ourselves or someone.

The answer is simple.
Control expectations, control anger.

This might be easier said than done. But, saying it comes first, the rest would eventually follow. Try it yourself and see that if it actually works.

P.S – The art you see in this post was created by using Fresh Paint app.