Consider the following comments on anger.
For every minute you remain angry, you give up sixty seconds of peace of mind.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Anybody can become angry, that is easy, but to be angry with the right person and to the right degree is not easy.
Aristotle
Holding on to anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.
Anonymous
There is a kind of calm that is really just fear pretending it has forgiven.
The people told never to be angry are usually the ones with the most to be angry about.
Write a reflective piece in response to one or more of these comments. Your essay will be assessed on the quality of your thinking and the way you express it.
A way into this prompt
Reflect on anger as a feeling we are taught to distrust yet which often carries accurate information about what we value and where we have been wronged. You might begin with a personal occasion of anger and ask, in hindsight, whether it was a failure of control or a signal worth heeding. Move between the counsel that anger only poisons the one who holds it and the rival sense that some injustices deserve to be met with heat rather than serenity. A reflective turn could distinguish anger that clarifies and motivates from anger that merely corrodes, and notice how the same emotion can do both. Caution: resist tidying the piece into either a denunciation of anger or a celebration of it, since the more honest territory is learning when it is the messenger and when it is the disease.