Atlas
“We, afflicted by ourselves, gladly afflicting, gladly needing to be afflicted. We, who sleep with our anger laid beside us like a knife.”
~Rainer (René) Maria Rilke, “Antistrophes”
Our anger must be methodically and actively exercised, not buried in stillness.
I used to think that our unspent anger or pent-up restlessness makes us create our own problems. I also thought that overcoming these self-imposed hurdles and then seeing them as grandiose feats of heroism was beyond idiotic; that our energy shouldn’t be directed towards a preconceived notion we’ve convinced ourselves of.
I was wrong.
Although I don’t follow his teachings or testaments (I don’t know much about him), Rainer Rilke writes well when he emphasizes the “need to be afflicted.” We, in a sense, need to be afflicted because, at first glance, our anger is a sharper sword than our contentment. Having it gives us much more immediate energy, power, and equally dangerous presence.
At a certain point, one must “think up of a dragon” to destroy before anger, grief, or affliction devour everything, or far worse, before they lay dormant for the time being, decaying and rotting secretly into a fear of ourselves.
Applying to more practical occurrences, this is a means of living for some during the war. Indeed, this idea influences most of our church’s activities in Brovary. Rather than focusing on the war at hand (whether or not our congregates serving in the army are safe or whether border patrols are still active), I’ve noticed that we consciously direct our energy towards more minute issues—like planning a gathering together for a campfire meal and coffee.
We haven’t let ourselves be overcome by our grief or overridden by wrath. On the contrary, our “biggest problems” are contradictorily smaller than the war surrounding us. Our dragons are little, and we overcome them much faster than a war can be.
Contrary to Rilke’s notion, our minds have found that we’ve had enough of affliction. We’d instead sip at our successfully-acquired coffee in the cold than let our hopelessness and wrath consume us slowly.
Innately, anger holds both power and, by extension, danger. The key to handling it is to delegate it to productive activities. In a world where our anger is so accessible, it is vital to make the choice to let it out on, indeed, in sillier terminology, these “little dragons.” We should let our frustration out on tangible issues that we can take hold of rather than focus on unreachable enemies or those undeserving of our wrath.
“Some search for gold,
Some dragon to slay…”
-Atlas, Coldplay
