Editor’s note: Our guest contributor is based in Australia, so some spelling and usage reflect Australian English.
Let’s have lunch. Let’s pack up. And let’s go to bed.
I have twin toddlers, so I say some version of that all day, and a good share of it comes back declined. By about the fourth round I can feel something arriving that I did not choose.
Which is the question I want to ask, and it sounds like it has an obvious answer. When you lost your temper last week, what actually happened? Not what set you off. What happened inside you, in what order, in the half second before you spoke.
Most of us cannot say. We have a rich vocabulary for the trigger and almost none for the mechanism. And a man who cannot describe the mechanism of his own anger will keep aiming his effort at the trigger, which is the one part of the arrangement he does not control.
The Thomistic tradition has a description of that mechanism. It is unnervingly precise, it is about eight centuries old, and it names six specific ways anger gets out of a man and into his house.
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