December 11, 2025
“Anger is the deepest form of care, for another, for the world, for the self, for a life, for the body, for a family and for all our ideals, all vulnerable and all, possibly, about to be hurt.”
David Whyte, Consolations
For a long time, I resisted anger. Whenever the feeling arose, I tried to supress it, to distance from it, to ignore it altogether. But anger, I have learned, is a signal. A blinking red light. The pulling of the andon cord. Stop everything. Something vital requires your attention. Ignore, and you will pay the price.
David Whyte goes on to write that anger “points toward the purest form of compassion”. It’s not just rage or frustration, it is an unwillingness to accept injustice, betrayal, or harm. Anger arises because you care. Because you love. Because something is at stake. He writes that anger is “often simply the unwillingness to live the full measure of our fears or of our not knowing, in our wanting the best, in the face of simply being alive and loving those with whom we live.”
In other words, “anger is the essential living flame of being fully alive and fully here; it is a quality to be prized, to be tended, an invitation to finding a way to bring that source fully into the world through making the mind clearer and more generous, the heart more compassionate, and the body larger and strong enough to hold it.”
These days when anger shows up I try to welcome it. Not to act impulsively (although I am human and make mistakes), but to listen. To remind myself that underneath that fire is care. And in a world dulled by apathy, numbness, and pessimism, that spark matters. It says: This matters. You matter. Something here is worth protecting. And that, to me, is worth honoring.