Rollercoaster

Al-Anon enjoins us not to be angry with the alcoholic.

What is true of the alcoholic is true generally of the ill, the incapable, and the evil. Even where there is notionally agency across the sweep of time, in the moment of the wrongdoing, there is not. The flowerpot falling from the window cannot be reproached for hitting the ground; it is he who knocked or pushed the flowerpot that is at fault. In the person who misbehaves, the miscreant, the causal agent, lies upstream of the actor, the person actually performing the ill deed. Each person is really a sequence of people operating through time. Once the actor is acting, the agent is no more: the object of reproach has ceased to exist.

Are we all predetermined? Far from it. For the individual can choose to adopt a different path, at the still point of the turning world between moments, having stepped outside the causal chain, to buckle himself into a new, better rollercoaster.

To return to the introductory idea, anger is:

(1) Irrational

(2) Counterproductive practically

(3) Self-harming