Anger Monkeys and Meditation

Anger Monkeys and Meditation

            There are a couple of things on my mind this morning: anger monkeys and meditation.  Occasionally I run into anger monkeys, and mostly these are men, with dogs they can’t control at the end leashes held tight as if strangling them is a reasonable training technique.  These dogs can never, under any circumstance, be off leash primarily because they would head for the hills and keep going forever.  Now before anybody goes wah wah, I do keep my dogs on leashes when I’m walking the neighborhood not so much to comply with social norms, but because I don’t want them to get hit by cars.  However, sometimes when I’m at the park, after spending some time in the off-leash area, I walk around the rest of the park and let Flower chase lizards and ground squirrels.  Fortunately, she’s a spaz and rarely catches them, but being a terrier it’s her raison d’ etre.   Barley, my other dog, has to stay on a leash because he tends to run off and then completely forget where he’s run from, where he ought to be running to, and everything else pertinent to his continued existence.  This is probably why when I adopted him he was all banged up from getting run over.  Anyway, off leash, Flower doesn’t really pay attention to anything but whatever she’s chasing, or imagines she’s chasing, beneath a dumpster or around a bush.  She couldn’t care less about other dogs; she pays attention to me and checks in often.  This activity, AKA, being allowed to do what she was bred to do, makes her incredibly happy.  As a result of letting my dogs have fun, they have very good mental health and anyone who knows me knows that they are well behaved and easy to be around.

            But this morning I ran into an anger monkey.  Everybody gets angry sometimes, but an anger monkey is a person for whom anger is the default state.  They’re always looking for something to be pissed off at and this guy was no exception.  White, bald, head kind of flat in the back, he had a female of the species and three or four muscular, boxer, pit bull looking dogs over which he had very little control, on leashes.   Well, the female of the species wasn’t on a leash, at that moment; anyway what they do in their free time matters naught to me. When the man saw Flower, at that second fully engaged trying to get a lizard on the other side of the chain link surrounding the baseball diamond, he started yelling at me about fucking leash laws; that he was going to call the cops along with a bunch of other anger monkey stuff I wasn’t really paying attention to.  Now, I love the word “fuck” as much as anyone, but many people use it as a catch all word because they don’t have enough words in their vocabularies to say anything meaningful or come anywhere near understanding or questioning their generally deranged states.  This is where the subject of meditation comes in.  (I know, finally, right?)

            I’ve been a meditator on and off since I was about 17.  The techniques I use are mostly a combination of California new age and Tibetan Buddhism, but daily meditation has nothing to do with religion.  Meditation is just the practice of training your mind to watch itself as an objective thing the way you might watch a river flow by.  Some days, my river is full of old tires, washing machines, garbage, mud, used condoms, and all kinds of other junk; some days it is pristine, gentle and cool, and generally it’s somewhere in between.  The point is not to analyze or judge; it’s not even to come to conclusions or sculpt opinions, but just to watch it go by without jumping onto some particular hunk of junk.  Such hunks generally come in the form of fears: fears about money, relationships, the plumbing, the government, etc.  I’ve had good discipline about meditation lately, mostly because I live in the desert and have been off work during the first summer session at the college where I work, and stuck inside, have few excuses not to meditate.  Nothing needs vacuuming, nobody needs me to bake them a pie.  What I’ve discovered is that daily meditation changes my mind.  Kind of in the way that, if you’re musically inclined, practice changes your ear.

            Now off hand, I can recall two times in which I reacted in anger monkey fashion myself, both the result of verbal assaults from strangers and to my way of thinking, unjustified.  Feeling   threatened, I screamed back.   This was visceral, born of a perceived need to defend myself, but lately, a change of perception has occurred and I no longer react that way.  Instead, when threatened, a kind of inverse calm comes over me.  The other day when someone rear ended my car, I genuinely felt more concern about her—she’d hit her head on her steering wheel—than distress over the fact that she’d plowed into me at speed and fucked my car all up.  Then today, when the anger monkey was yelling at me about Flower being off leash, instead of feeling angry, I just held up my hand in a “stop” gesture, asked him to cease his use of profanity, and to stop raging in front of his daughter.  Since “his daughter” was actually his girlfriend, which had become apparent to me about a quarter of the way into the altercation, this earned me a great big, “go fuck yourself,” and also some laughs from the Tai Chi class practicing under a tree, but I never got that gut fear/anger thing.  Not at all.  A welcome by product of reacting this way since my fight or flight reaction is not triggered and no adrenalin is produced, I’m not tired afterwards.

            The point is, in both these altercations, it wasn’t that I was feeling anger and suppressing it.  That’s not it at all.  It’s that I didn’t feel angry.  There was nothing to suppress.  I attribute this wholly to the practice of meditation.  In other words, the Buddhists are right.  Meditation really does change the human heart and I don’t think any religion that doesn’t include it is of much use.  You can tell people what they ought to do, or ought not do, claim all kinds of hellfire and damnation as consequence, but when no one is looking, or they think no one is, they’re going to do it anyway.  It makes much more sense to address the problem of wanting to sew chaos, violence, and revenge in the first place.

            As I walked away from this altercation, non-altercation or whatever it was, part of me wanted to turn around, go tell his female of the species that eventually, lacking any other target, her anger monkey was going to turn it all on her.  But some lessons people just have to learn for themselves.