When my friend comes along and says, “Oh, Chodron! Are you angry? Are you upset? Is something wrong?” In my mind, I go, “No! I’m not angry! Get out of here! Mind your own business!”

At that moment, what I really want inside more than anything is to be able to connect with the person. The way I am acting is pushing the person away. Quite amazing, isn’t it? Our behaviour brings about the very opposite of what we really want at that moment. Think about it. When you are really angry at a friend or a family member, what is it you really want underneath? Are you wanting to hurt them? No. You are wanting to connect with them, aren’t you? But you are not able to do so at that moment because something had happened. Yet, what we say and do often prevents communication from occurring between us because we are so locked in our anger. Has that ever occured to you?

A real friend is someone who will tell us that we are going down the wrong path. However, when we are wrong, we do not want to talk to that friend at that time because that friend who really cares for us has become an enemy since he or she is saying we are at fault for this situation. If we talk to a friend and our friend says, “You kind of contributed to that,” that person is no longer our friend. We only want to talk to people who are going to say, “You’re right. How could they do that? They’re so awful. You have every right to be angry. How are we going to get even?” We only talk to the people who we know are going to agree with our view, because that is our childish definition of a friend: You agree with my ideas. You do not tell me when I have a problem. You do not tell me that something is my responsibility. You side with me against somebody else even if I am wrong.

We may frame our retaliation as compassion that will in turn stop our enemies from doing the same thing again and hurting somebody else. So, we punch the person in the nose for somebody else’s benefit, when actually our motivation is, “I hope his nose breaks!” But we are too polite to say that publicly, so we gloss it over with, “I’m so compassionate and this is for his own good and blah, blah, blah.”

Usually, when we are angry, we are very focused on, “What should I do? I need to do something.” I have discovered that when I am angry, that is not the time to decide what to do, because I am too angry to see the situation clearly. That is the time when I should calm my mind down, and when my mind is calm, then I can look at the situation and see a constructive way to respond. But when I am angry, I cannot clearly see a constructive way to response. The mind is too confused.

“365 Gems of Wisdom” e-book is out now!