Navigating our anguish in an unjust world
Life and the world are full of injustice, and it is easy, very easy, to be angry.
The flames of our frustration burn even more when we encounter the evil that humans are capable of, and if we add to that the temporality and fragility of our existence, life becomes a raging journey of anger. So, we get angry and anger ourselves even more by constantly asking about the existence of a higher power in the face of pain in the world and unfairness.
We have good reasons to be angry.
And the source of our anger is great because there is a lot to be angry about. We resent our shortcomings, our mistakes, our inability to understand whether there is meaning and purpose to our existence and that of the world in general. We struggle with the gap between what we want and what we can achieve, and it is harder today than at any other time because the world is full of abundance, but we fail to gain much of this abundance, which further provokes our discontent. In addition, what constitutes this rage is also the frustration that others perceive things and the world differently from us which often forces us to compromise our ideals. And this incessant battle continues almost all our lives and threatens to drown us in a sea of resentment and bitterness.
Amid all this storm of anger, there is an anchor: and this is our resilience.
Our resilience is a force that allows us to withstand life's storms and emerge stronger from the other side. Resilience is not denying the existence of anger but is what helps us harness anger to perceive the world and life more realistically, to accept what cannot be changed, and to harness all our strength to live in a way that allows us not to be broken to pieces by all this injustice in life.
Anger, even if and although sometimes justified, can become a destructive force and resilience prevents anger from eating us alive.
Resilience helps us recognize and accept that life, by its very nature, is fraught with injustice. The more we perceive reality as it is, without conceptions, pipe dreams, childish expectations, we will realize that mistakes will always exist, both personal and social, and only in retrospect we are smarter, and it is clear to us that perhaps they could have been prevented. In practice, we can only learn from them so as not to repeat the same mistake a second or third time, but new mistakes will always happen.
And true, not everyone believes that there is any meaning at all to existence in this world or to our personal existence, and true, the search for meaning in an unjust and chaotic world is really a deep challenge, but this does not mean that one should stop for a moment and strive to try to understand or find a personal purpose , a purpose in life for which it is worth being less angry and live better.
What about believing in God?
Resilience does not require us to find absolute certainty. Faith only helps people become more resilient, but life's challenges can be met even if the mystery of God and faith is obscured. Ultimately, resilience urges us to find strength in the face of uncertainty in life.
In the pursuit of a more just and compassionate world, let resilience be the guiding force in your life because through resilience we turn anger if not positive, then at least to repair the personal and social world by recognizing that anger is human but has the power to create a slightly more harmonious and peaceful life because the other alternative will burn our lives and there is nothing sadder than to sober up one day and realize that we have simply been angry most of our lives.
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