Getting Back Up, IX: Fire, and the Controlled Burn

Separating ardor and rage is challenging. But crucial. I am an aggressive, passionate person. Not really a violent person—I’ve never really been in a fight, I don’t hit the people I love, and I have no desire to. But I’m contentious and self-willed, and that fire in me won’t go out. I’ve tried a long time to make it do so, but that mostly just made me the second kind of angry: outraged, brooding, nursing hurt.

When the car was cut from me, I stood up. Tall. And the blood began to throb and thrum inside me. I needed the hardship. I needed the difficult solutions. I needed to use my own body to establish my own will, to get what I needed as an exercise in resolve and drive. I needed the hardship that life threw in my face, desperately.

That fire’s been in me, but I’d been turning at the Universe, choosing the second aspect, brooding on the wrongs done me. And I’d been willful before, but it was a bitter will to establish, without success, my desire for how things should be. But finally I got to it: screw the wrongs done me, screw how things should be. The wrongs done me are my greatest strength, the way things are, are the way things should be--even if they're not the way I intend to let things stay. The way things are is purposeful; I set will to deciding what I wish to do in this time. And the bumps and bruises of life are when I know I’m most alive. Because they force me to adapt, force me to redefine what success and happiness are, force me to prevail using my own faculties, force me to be alert, mindful, and they force me to do so with compassion—because having to shift balance and awareness shifts outlook. So much compassion is generated in that struggle.