Attempting to demonstrate just how angry one is, while sitting on a bench at the keys of a piano, I came to discover, was not without its difficulties.  In retrospect, learning to play was a good thing.  What (little) I know about rhythm and time signature and chord structure comes from not forgetting much more than eighty-five percent of what I learned in the however-many years I took lessons as a kid.  

But at the time I wasn't looking at those lessons with such a benevolent eye.  I hated the piano.  I despised the sound it made, and besides, the whizzing sound of my friends' bikes - as they passed not thirty feet beyond the open window of our living room - was the only sound registering in my mind, anyway.  The clown who composed the music I was supposed to be learning probably wasn't even from the U.S., and had no idea who Led Zeppelin was.  Of course that particular argument, as straw-grasping and irrelevant as it was then, I came to see was even weaker than I thought a number of years later, when I found out Led Zeppelin was British.  And also that Mozart and Jimmy Page just missed each other by a couple hundred years.  But never mind all that: I had a sore finger, and the brass sustain pedal under the Baldwin was like a white-hot iron on the foot I had recently cut at the pool, even through the sole of my Stan Smith tennis shoe.  At least those are the things I tried to convey to my mom, every time I faced the steep uphill grade of forty-five minutes on the practice timer.  It might as well have been a week.

I tried playing the songs I already knew over and over.  She understandably caught on relatively quickly.  I'd play everything at twice the volume, hoping to annoy her just enough that she'd demand I quit playing.  She told me she enjoyed being able to hear me throughout the house.  I considered lighting the thing on fire, but I knew after my parents were able to rebuild their home, my mom would likely contact officials at whatever juvenile detention center in which I was living, and offer to buy them a piano.  As startling as it must be for her to grasp, I wasn't always the textbook model of patience and virtue my wife knows me to be today.

The fact that I never won a single battle in the practice war was testament to my mom's fortitude.  But it didn't change the fact that I was furious about having to do it.  Looking back at myself with the kindness only years allow, I think my anger was understandable, at least when placed against things that anger most people:  Made to do something we don't like, with no visible payoff or purpose, we normally chafe a little bit.

But was it justified?  Not even a little.  My parents paid for my food, my house, my fourth-grade Halloween masks and the fuel to drive me around.  And piano lessons.  They also rightfully made the decisions about the things their kids would and would not be doing at given times in their childhoods.  And one of those things was that I would learn to play the piano.

It would be much more convenient - these words much easier to write - if I could say, simply:  'That was then, and this is now'.  But there are plenty of times these days when I fear things haven't changed much.  It's of course been decades since my parents had a say in my daily affairs.  And I now enjoy virtually every type of music imaginable, including the piano.  But impatience and anger still show themselves too often in my life, attached now to different circumstances.

Is it justified?  If I'm honest...rarely.  In fact, sadly, there are plenty of times when it isn't even understandable, either to me or the recipients of it.  And that's why anger is something that can only be looked at in a quiet, objective environment, free of conflict and argument.  It is far too powerful of an emotion to be reasoned with, in the moments it flares.  No matter how wrong we are - even if we realize it instantly - the control it asserts over our more logical emotions allows us to justify our anger by any means necessary.  It is connected to our very basic instincts:  Competition, survival, establishing space.

That overwhelming intensity is what makes it so potentially damaging to all parties involved.  The relief we feel in the moment is only that of venting the pent up exhaust of the by-products - but the speed and explosiveness doesn't allow the valve to stay open long enough for the moldy root to escape.  It stays inside, tentacles still attached, rotting, where it continues to produce its rancid fumes, and the pressure builds again.

And the root may be hard to identify, even when we look.  It may be that we already had the sensitivity and propensity for it, and others mistakenly encouraged it to flourish.  Or we may know the origin precisely:  The root curated and fueled, knowingly and obviously in the bright light of day, by someone in our pasts or present.

The problem is that the origin doesn't matter, because the damage is the same.  And anger can be powerfully addictive.  Particularly for the quiet, or the depressed or the downtrodden, anger is a means of being heard that they seldom experience any other way.  Further, anger, by itself, is not inherently wrong.  So it becomes easy to feel righteous in our entertainment of it, particularly in the obscured judgement of a perceived slight against us.  There are of course times when anger is true and just and necessary.  There can be no other explanation for its place in our arsenal of emotions.  But the mere fact that we might be justified in feeling anger, does not immediately reveal to us how it should be expressed and channeled.  Or whether that expression, justified or otherwise, is worth the cost of the damage it will most certainly inflict.

Nor does justification release us from the responsibility of thinking before we speak.  Of being conscious of the far-reaching effects of our words.  Of the fact that, most often, when someone offends, it is merely a revelation that they too know the feeling of offense.  By definition, nobody expresses anger from a quiet soul, or place of contented happiness.  I certainly don't mean to say that we will - or should - always feel the peaceful bliss of an untroubled mind.  To even suggest it would be to ignore the human condition.

But consider the words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (which I have added to the 'Quotes' section of this site), who experienced torture and death in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany:  

Nothing that we despise in other men is inherently absent from ourselves. We must learn to regard people less in the light of what they do or don't do, and more in light of what they suffer.

It is in this wisdom, it seems to me, that we can find answers as to when the expression of anger is necessary.  Truly necessary.  And the reality is that it isn't often.  Are our lives, or those of people with us endangered?  Or is it simply our fragile pride under attack?  Is the character of someone we love being assailed?  Or is it merely our opinion being met with disagreement?  Have we taken into account that it is exceedingly rare for the cause of someone expressing anger toward us in daily life to be anything but much untold suffering they have experienced themselves?  Is the pain we will inflict in true defense, or is it merely to experience a few seconds of being 'right', at the risk of planting another root, which will then grow in others, and ferment, and create a new cycle of pressure and relief and injury?  

Knowing that words are both feathers and knives will not always stop me from erring.  Nor will it always stop you.  That too is the human condition.  But in our quieter moments, we can resolve, over and over again if necessary, that today we will look into the eyes of those who tomorrow might offend, and see the loveliness and the pain.  The imperfection which - more often than offense - takes the form of wonder and extraordinary individuality:  And that those are the things that make them worthy of our attention, even at moments more difficult than others.  And they are true even of people more difficult than others.

And remembering that when in their eyes we see revealed sorrow, and mistrust, and the scars of a long journey, it is likely we are noticing but a reflection:  Our own eyes.  

And in them a picture of our own suffering, that until then we were certain we had buried long ago.