If You Build It

Recently a co-worker of mine asked me a question that has provoked a sort of lengthy thought process that I can't shrug off. It was a benign enough setting--she and I in the break room at Barnes & Noble talking about our livelihood, our purpose--when she dropped this little gem on me. And it wasn't the typical "what drives you?" or even "what moves you?" but rather this:

What makes you Angry?

Huh. That, she proposed to me, is where you will really find the answer to what it is you should do. Think about what really boils your blood, what frustrates you endlessly, that which you cannot change--or can you? Here's my instinctual response: Ignorance. And there is a lot to that word, I know. But I mean it in a really subjective sense, because I think that ignorance is far from a blanket term. What are the distinctions? I'm still fleshing it out in my mind but I do know that learned ignorance is equally as troublesome as that which is chosen. And by chosen I mean putting on blinders, relying on stereotypes and cliches, ignoring the self-awareness that I believe lies within each of us if we decide to access it. With that, I think I'm circling back to another idea altogether, and that is Consciousness. Accountability. Self-Respect. I see a lack of these traits in humans every day and yes, it makes me angry.

Now a word on anger, or, an aside: The idea of anger as an emotion is not something I'm entirely comfortable with. Sure, I get fired up about stuff ALL the time, but do I really qualify that as anger? It has such negative, caustic connotations and I try to maintain a minimal amount of that in my life, for preservation purposes if nothing else! However, and maybe this is part of my friend's point--Anger often incites change, and that is what we're talking about now, isn't it? Good, meaningful, powerful changes, one tiny little step at a time.