‘That’s how it starts.  The fever, the rage, the feeling of powerlessness that turns good men…cruel.’

I lost 20 pounds this Ramadan.  It’s the most weight I’ve ever dropped while fasting; I’m trying to finish ‘optimizing’ my diet so I can stay in ‘middleweight champion’ shape year round.  Cutting myself away from most of my non essential stuff also gave me time to reflect if it was time to let go of other things I don’t need any more.  Bad habits, negative influences. The things that go beyond ‘a bad day’ and turn into repeatedly asking myself ‘Why am I doing this?  How does this really end?’

While I was getting rid of my physical and emotional fat, something else happened. Something unexpected.  But something I’ve wanted for a long time and I feel is as necessary as everything else.

I found my anger.

Or to be very specific, I rediscovered how to ‘hold on’ to my anger.  To feel no guilt about it as a natural human emotion (and there’s a bigger conversation going on telling people of my tribe to ‘not be angry’ when it’s completely justified, we’ll save that conversation for another day).  My personal evolution from Rebel Without a Pause to Dark Knight to Zen Master to, however this would be labeled.  And every step was completely necessary.  You can implode like a dream deferred if you boil but try to smother it forever inside yourself; you can be ill prepared for war if you’ve lost your will to fight for what you want.

This is right.  I’ll never see myself as ‘brooding’ or ‘unfriendly’, but if that’s how I’m perceived by strangers when I’m not in the mood to crack jokes or I don’t go out of my way to be befriend everybody in the room, that’s on them now.

So now that I’ve rediscovered how to tap into and channel my anger, how do I best use it?

Hm…