Annoyance & Anger – Part I

Emotions, the states which we find ourselves in, in reaction to thoughts, feelings & behaviour of ourselves as well as the ever existing influence of our environment. Lately, i have been through a mix of varied emotions (Google “emotions” if you wish to view what wiki classifies as emotions of if you are curious to know about what exactly is/are Emotions).

To begin with, Annoyance & Anger have & do top my list of emotional state’s
experienced. Annoyance is nothing but a deviation from one’s current state of work/activity/thought to another state which is not of one’s liking (at that instant). The mild ooh’s, aah’s & argh’s we let out on being interrupted, distracted, disturbed etc etc. I’ve felt it, and so have you.
Anger on the other hand is a heightened state of annoyance, rage. Honestly, i never thought about what distinguished the two until i decided to blog about them and realised that annoyance on many occasions led to anger.

I dont intend to shed light on the technical/social or scientific aspects of the two. What i do have in mind though is to ‘pen down’ here about why we allow ourselves to get angry. Anger, as you may have realised is more uncontrolled. If so, then that also leads to the realisation that annoyance is more controlled and can definitely allow us to prevent anger from engulfing ourselves.

As i sat down in the bus today morning to get to my workplace i happened to have the misfortune of allowing (out of sympathy) a partially bald man probably nearing 30′s squeeze into the little room beside me in the last row of seats. When the bus conductor came to the back end of the bus to give tickets, this man said the name of his destination as he held out a note to pay for the ticket. His word’s however fell on deaf ears because of the surrounding noise and so the conductor politely asked him again, to which the man again replied.  So far so good i thought to myself until as the conductor reached for the ticket in his ticket box the man beside me said to himself in a lower tone

“Tujhya maayla, haan ??”

as he mimicked the conductor’s second time of questioning, stressing on the ‘haan’ (or huh). I was left wondering as to what was the need for his grumbling when the conductor didnt utter anything rubbish for this man to speak shit ( Ok, im annoyed a bit thinking about that incident…easy..breathe easy….calm down ).

That wasn’t the end of it as he continued to grumble to himself at times and even at the conductor’s insistance that passengers exit from the front of the bus. The only time he was quiet and had a decent expression on his face was when he was eyeing girls waiting at the busstop ( I wasn’t looking ). At such times when i’ve felt annoyed i’ve somehow drifted into thoughts wherein im beating the offender to pulp !! It’s a funny sight i see and somehow it gets me out of my state of annoyance, ironically by drifting into a thought
influenced by ANGER…!

I’ve yet to find out a better method to control my annoyance in public places (any suggestions?, use the comments facility below this post) because most times when i get angry i laugh it off, doing that amidst strangers would be termed as madness. Thankfully, i never had much of a public display of rage because of my PJ’ing ability that gets me the smile i need to control myself.
The only question that arises in my mind is, ” How are we to block annoyance from leading to anger ? “

[To be continued...]