When, If Ever, Is Anger an Appropriate Response?
Dear readers, I think we need to accept that anger is a natural human or animalistic reaction when our emotions have been provoked, inflicted by someone, an undesired fate or disappointment in our lives, or maybe news of something we don’t like. Wars, policies, corruption. Also, everyday life. Things and people irritate the shit out of us. Traffic, behaviour, attitudes. We’re all human, we are all fallible from time to time. I guess it’s how we manifest and express that anger, that we should be asking. Is it ever appropriate to shout or scream or be aggressive or inflict violence because we can’t control our emotions or accept an outcome that is deemed unfavourable? It can be looked at from an individual’s or a group’s perspective. How many times have we seen a whole country or tribe inflict extreme violence or genocide against another in human history? Look at what’s happening in Gaza right now. I’m sure we can find certain circumstances to show anger, such as exacting revenge or overcoming a perceived injustice. This happens with unfortunate frequency in Honduras, especially due to the impunity of the authorities. Police don’t lift a finger to resolve a murder or violation, which leaves a family or gang no other option but to take the law into their own hands and seek their own form of justice. Hiring a hitman is cheap I hear; sadly, as is the value of life. When I was younger, I used to fly off the handle a lot. It was mainly immaturity and impatience, but the amount of times I lost it and regretted it made me understand the need to stop, breathe, and reflect, or simply move away from a situation. I also saw how other people lost it, ended up in trouble with the law or their workplace, lost friendships or partnerships, and the reasons for the outbursts were never worth the consequences. These were important lessons for me to witness and learn from others’ mistakes. I guess I learned to be assertive and build healthy boundaries with people who test my patience, or simply walk away from those who are toxic, and learn to forgive. It’s about realising our ego and weaknesses and learning techniques to communicate and channel anger in a controlled way. In short, it’s about turning weakness into strength. I can still lose my shit on bad days, but they are very few, I’m pleased to say. But going back to the question of if it is ever appropriate to show anger, I guess, as stated above, we can find situations where we would express anger, or look back and justify our behaviour when we have lost our temper. But was it worth the surge in energy? What did the stress do for you? Have you ever seen an angry person and wish to adopt that lifestyle? Obviously, not. Instead of finding excuses to express anger, we should ask how we can channel this surge into something positive. It’s easier said than done, and I’m certainly not suggesting that we shouldn’t ignore our anger or be passive about it. That’s how people often turn angry and strange because they can’t find output to the pent-up anger, which manifests into other health problems, such as tumours and rashes, I believe. (Doctors are probably shaking their reads reading this). However, it is kind of transforming the yin into the yang, turning something dark into something bright, a heavyweight into proactivity. I’m no expert, and I also struggle to practice what I preach. However, I do remember reading an interview in The Guardian back in 2019 with the French footballer Thierry Henry, a man I’ve always admired both for his skills and goals, and his punditry. I remember him discussing how he used anger from growing up in poverty in Paris as a driving force to push himself forward. Instead of letting anger consume him, he learned to channel it into improving his performance on the pitch, pushing himself to reach higher levels and achieve success, a key aspect of his mindset. The article has sat with me ever since and helped me in my daily life. In short, and rather self-mocking, Monsieur Henry changed my life. So, here is my answer. Is an expression of anger ever appropriate? Of course, but maybe it is better to manifest that energy in another area of our life. Maybe we will find more success. Maybe we will be more like Thierry Henry. This question is from the book Question Yourself by Dave Edelstein and I. C. Robledo.
Who Are You?
Dear readers, It’s not a question from the book of questions I shared in the post, Is This Just a Station on Your Soul’s Journey? However, I was asked this question during some leadership training through my work at Nuestros Pequeños Hermanos conducted by Perennial. I had a week to think about my answer, but it’s funny how a question containing just three words, so simple on the face of it, leaves us trembling in an existential crisis and choking on our thoughts. The irony is that millions of us around the world paint our lives on social media to show off our lifestyle, what we are doing and our experiences to demonstrate who we are, but we very rarely ask ourselves these questions to dig out who we truly are and get to know ourselves better. As mentioned in an earlier post, I have been asking myself questions like these over the past few months, which has helped me understand where I stand on a whole number of topics, but this one stumped me: Who am I? Nicholas Rogers aka Ajmaqventurer, I am male, 44 years old, a Scorpio, from Birmingham, a journalist, a writer, an artist, I live in Tegucigalpa, divorced, I know my family and friends (although I try to trim the list down year after year), Dave Chappelle on a bad day cheers me up. This is who I am, kind of, but they are only surface-type elements that describe me, which doesn’t really show my essence; who I am on a deeper level. This is more than just a check-in or personal weather report; this is finding out who I am for myself. But then I realised, “Shite, do I really know myself? And is it true that maybe other people know me better than I know myself?” It is a wonderful shadow question, to build a steady foundation beneath our feet and understand ourselves, rather than numbly show off to the world how we want to be perceived. For myself, I feel I’ve ignored who I am for far too long. And maybe it is true: friends and family have a better grasp of who I am, as I do of others through examining and judging them. Don’t judge me for judging others. The Bible tells us not to do it, but we all fall for the trap. It’s a human flaw we all have. But saying that, by judging someone doesn’t necessarily mean we know who they are. It is more the behaviour or character traits we admire or dislike, which can tell us a lot, but not really windows to the soul. Maybe I’m scared to answer it on some level. Maybe I won’t like who I am or I will just find a void. Then I realised, “Nah, I think I’m quite a decent chap. There’s enough within me to explore.” Then I went on a wild bender of booze and psychedelic introspection: joke! No, I sat down with my journal and tried to answer, but weirdly, I hit a form of writer’s block, because this seemingly simple question was so full of baggage and weight. Yes, some readers might feel I am second-guessing myself, overthinking this riddle completely, and they know themselves oh so well. (Well, f–k you, then!). Pen in hand, journal before me, and nada. “Where do I start?” Nothing came. So I thought, being that this is leadership training, I can begin by asking this question from the perspective of myself as a leader. So I began: “I never planned on being a leader in my professional field. I enjoyed working in a team, but I also enjoyed working independently doing my own thing. Through teaching, I learned various leadership abilities, such as how to motivate and lead students to succeed and learn, seeing them improve, and I found I enjoyed it. I then became Communications Manager and then Director of Communications, where I have learned to lead at executive and middle management level, learning through courses, reading, advice from friends and colleagues, podcasts, and trial and error. I always do my best for NPH, the health of the organisation and my colleagues, making difficult decisions using the skills and experiences to direct, create opportunities, bring people together and overcome challenges. I have enjoyed it more than I expected, more so that I am an introvert, and I have been forced to come out of my comfort zone on many occasions. I have harnessed interpersonal skills and learned to relate and find triggers to motivate people to work to one common goal. This is through trial and error, as mentioned before. I enjoy it, but it is tiring. People aren’t robots. You can’t rewire them or edit them using coding. You have to guide and support, but also know when to give them space and not micromanage, and also look after my own mental health to engage in activities outside the working environment, such as writing on my blog, Ajmaqventurer.” This was great. Therapeutic. But still, I was only skimming the edges without delving into who I am. I’m a leader at NPH. Does this define me? What about the rest of me? I’m more than my job. As part of the training, I was paired in a virtual breakout room with a good friend and colleague of mine, Daniel Zapata, who works for NPH Mexico. I started by mumbling something about how difficult it was to answer this question, and repeated a little of what I said above as a leader. Daniel then came out with something that, I will paraphrase below, was reminiscent of The Verve’s Bittersweet Symphony, but enveloped in something I found profound: “I am mortal. I live and die. In between, we have to take advantage of the moments of happiness we have. It’s impossible to be happy all the time. We know that. We make connections. It is what life is about: making connections. With friends and family, with our
Is This Just a Station on Your Soul’s Journey?
Dear readers, For the past 7 or 8 months, as a way of getting to learn myself a little more, I’ve been answering introspective questions, using the book Question Yourself: 365 Questions to Explore Your Inner Self & Reveal Your Inner Nature by Dave Edelstein and I.C. Robledo. The book was chosen pretty much at random. You can find quite a few on any online bookstore or platform. I would answer two or three a day in a personal journal, then sometimes go a week or even a month without a word. The questions have ignited my unknown quest to understand where I stood on a whole number of emotional and spiritual subjects, which before I was just ambivalent or somewhat apathetic about. As you can imagine, asking such questions is a wonderful cathartic and enriching experience, almost a cleansing or purging toxins with a firm scrubbing of the soul and shedding light on old habits and ways of thinking that no longer serve me. To put it another way, a search for my own truths and values, without contamination of thought or opinion of another maje*…I mean, person, in a peaceful solitude and armed with a nice fruity cup of tea. In some ways, it has been part of a healing process, for reasons you can find in my post The Game of Grief. Saying that, sometimes I enjoyed the contamination of thought from others and asking majes…I mean, friends, aleros**, questions, particularly when they were drunk, dazed and confused, just to see what nonsense they’d come up with. Then, I would horrendously bully and ridicule them and their deepest, precious thoughts and make them believe their ideas were dogshit, but then still steal their genius pearls of amazement and redesign it as my own wisdom, intelligence and emotional maturity. Plagiarism, theft of thought and toxic manipulation at its very best [cue sarcastic bow]. I am of course joking. My friends barely have a brain cell between them. Yes, now I really am joking. It was good fun winding them up while they bumbled through their answers in intoxicated states. But more so, it was fascinating to hear reflections and the life stories that helped them come to such conclusions. I will share some of the questions and answers now and then. Feel free to write your own answers in the comments below. I invite them. Or, write them in your personal journal; I hope you receive the same mental benefits as myself. Is This Just a Station on Your Soul’s Journey? A nice facile question to begin with, then: the soul, or more so, “the soul’s journey”. I found it easy to answer when I did so in my journal. Now I think of it on a deeper level, the question raises so many more questions in my beliefs, and our belief systems as a society, loaded with concepts of faith and/or philosophy, that it makes it a little difficult knowing where to start. I am not particularly religious, nor do I pretend to be a philosopher, but I guess this question crosses all our minds at some stage (or station) of our lives (or soul’s journey), and while we all want to believe or come to a conclusion of what happens after we die, the truth is we never really know. Therefore, if this were a school essay, I would probably receive an F, “for sitting on a metaphysical fence”. Nonetheless, let me try. There are a couple of ways to interpret this question. The way we answer it hinges on what is meant by the “soul’s journey”, and whether it transcends to different lifetimes as many faiths believe, or does the journey end when the heart stops beating and we become a lush banquet for worms. A slightly morbid thing to say, I know, but I am a fan of The Walking Dead, so please accustom yourself with my ghast. It’s almost appropriate to mention The Walking Dead actually, as one of my favourite characters, Negan, a villainous yet humorous psychopath, walks around with a baseball bat wrapped in barbed wire which he named after his dead wife who he believes (or just says) is reincarnated into the bat. This very bat he uses for ending the lives of the dead and the living by hitting them rather hard over the head. Sorry for the spoiler. I will answer the question by first exploring whether the “soul journey” extends other to lifetimes, with “station” referring to this current lifetime. I also look at the alternative that the soul ends when this lifetime finishes and “station” refers to the here and now, and whether there are any benefits to this way of thinking. The Soul Journey So how can we define the Soul’s Journey? Something of a spiritual progression or evolution that a soul undergoes throughout its existence, which includes experiences, growth, learning, and ultimately, transcendence or reunification with a higher power or cosmic consciousness. When one thinks of “higher powers”, we can’t help but connect it to religion, faith and spirits. As mentioned above, there are many religious beliefs on the soul and what happens to the spirit once our physical body dies. In the Christian faith, there concept of the afterlife in Heaven, Hell or Purgatory. It all hinges on the judgement of an omnipresent being named God who analyses the sins we’ve committed during this lifetime. For more information, read the Bible. Otherwise, I recommend The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri; a nice bedtime read. As part of Mexican and Latin American culture Mexico is Dia de los Muertos, or Day of the Dead, when families craft ofrendas, marigolds, photographs, and beloved foods and beverages of their loved ones who have crossed over to the other side. The ofrendas are thought to beckon the souls back, as they listen to prayers, and savour the scents of their favourite dishes. For more information, go to Mexico. Otherwise, watch Coco. Islam is similar the Christian
Musings from the Coast: Drawings of the Sea
Dear readers, I’ve never lived close to the sea. Not for any length of time anyway. I’ve always found myself in cities and places landlocked and/or at some distance from the coast. I’m not sure why. 44 years on this planet. I’m almost obsessed with it, with a giant tattoo on my upper right arm, based loosely on The Great Wave off Kanagawa by Hokusai, which is also the cover of my current doodle book, a special gift from a special person. So what’s stopped me from moving to the coast? Life and career choices, I suppose. This personal goal hasn’t coincided with my career. It’s not a regret. There isn’t much point in that. It is what it is. But it is a goal I have. Bucket list stuff (as opposed to bucket and spade stuff: poor pun intended). To live by the sea. To have a home with sea breezes flowing through the windows, strolling on to the sand with the mass of blue before me. I see it there before me right now. I almost taste the salt in my mouth and feel the vibration of the crashing waves bounce up through me from my feet. I glare out in wonder and admiration at this big, beautiful force of nature before me, covering 71% of the Earth’s surface, 139 million miles2 or 361 million km2 of water, with a volume of approximately 1.37 billion km3. That’s a lot of H2O. It just has the added ingredient of dissolved salt, which accounts for 3.5% of the entire ocean mass. You do the maths if you want to know the total volume of salt in our seas. I’m just stealing these numbers from the web. In the morning, I would swim before work, then do the same in the evening. I then look up to the stars at night and lie mesmerised at the theatre before me: the universe. I would eat fresh fish at lunch and drink it down with coconut milk and/or pineapple juice. Quite a manifestation, isn’t it. It seems I have it all worked out. I plan on winning the lottery any day soon. See you in my beach house dreams. I know this isn’t an everyday reality for those who live by the coast, at least not for the majority. I’m not sure how people live their lives by the sea to be honest. I doubt it’s like the above. Hurricane and rip tide warnings. Sand flies that chomp through your flesh to the bone, jellyfish, sharks, snakes, sea crocodiles, pollution…the list goes on: all the cons of living by the sea. People I know who’ve moved to the coast from the city have told me that the novelty wears off pretty quickly. I’m crushing my own manifestation. I’m thinking of Honduras though. Those Caribbean beaches in the north. It’s Easter week and a sizable chunk of the population is flocking there as I write. I’m stuck in Tegucigalpa, about 5 hours south. Looking on with envy. But I wouldn’t want to go this week. Too many people. My moment will come again. I grew up in Birmingham in England, located probably at the furthest point from the coast in the country, the closest beach being Weston-Super-Mare which is two hours away, famous for the tide spending the majority of the time in the horizon so you don’t actually see the sea, and the sickly sweet rock, which wrecks teeth and your budget with dental bills. Preston, where I studied at university, is 20 miles from the seaside town Lytham St Annes, but as a penniless student without a car and dependent on public transport, beach trips were rare. The icy cold waters made swimming in it near impossible. Memories, though. I also lived in Madrid and Seville. The former was like Birmingham, far from the sea. The latter was closer, but not close enough. I spent a summer working in Calella de Palafrugell on the Costa Brava, a sleepy, picturesque town that used to be a fishing village. It was a 10 minute walk to the beach from where I resided and consisted of tiny coves where one could paddle or dive deep.. Every morning I would take a dip, or disappear on my few days off to the many little beaches close by and read Hemingway books while basking in the sun. The weeks went by swimmingly, pun intended, but a little too fast for my liking. Just two years ago I found a print of Calella while on a work trip in Barcelona, floating through the streets and galleries in Barrio Gótico, or Barri Gòtic in Catalan, by an artist I can’t remember the name of. It sits on my bedside table today, and you can find it to the left of this text. A small treasure that reminds me of those days at the coves. In Honduras, I reside in Tegucigalpa. It’s been my home for 14 years, although I often ask myself how I find myself in a country blessed with pristine beaches yet I live in a city nowhere near to any of them. It grates me, why? Seriously, why? Tegucigalpa isn’t the worst place in the world, but once you sample the beaches around Tela, La Ceiba and Trujillo, you wonder, what fuck are you doing here? You live once. Go, go, go. Tegus, as it is commonly known, is closer to the Pacific, just two hours or so away. The sun scorches and the water is murky with volcanic ash. It’s nice, don’t get me wrong; nice shrimp and shellfish, and there are mangroves and history on the island of Amapala. Yet, it struggles to compare with the North; the Caribbean vibe and turquoise waters, which feel warm and spiced and makes you feel you’re treading water in a relaxing tumbler of rum. Beach for the Brummies During the summer months, Birmingham City Council would lay out a fabricated beach close to Victoria Square outside
Shower Thoughts: Love and Hate
Dear readers, There are moments when we love to love and moments when we love to hate. Other moments when we hate to hate and then hate to love. Humans are complex beings. Emotions are complex to comprehend. A merry-go-round of confusion. Love and hate are two extremes that bring different colours to our eyes and chaos to our thoughts and hearts, triggering an assortment of behaviours that we sometimes struggle to understand, let alone others. The most mature and experienced minds can fall trap to it at any given moment, triggering a surge of energy and/or entangled thoughts. The triggered behaviours can bring great gifts or cause great harm to ourselves and others, sometimes intentionally, other times not. The heart. The soul. That intangible thing. Whatever you want to call it. It can be provoked and manipulated, again, by ourselves and others. Influenced by the words of others and/or impulsed by inflatuation, sexual throes and attraction that blindside us. There’s also the punch of our ego and vices and habits that auto-pilot us into tumultuous predicaments, a strange flow state where we don’t know where we’ve been and how we’ve ended up there. We just slept walked into something. There’s a moment we need to stop. Breathe. Untangle the knots. Let go. People. Humans. They affect our love and hate. They build you up and let you down, let you in and let you out, and you do the same to others. Again, sometimes intentionally, sometimes not. It’s an inevitable part of life. People can be intrinsically great or instrincically awful, and carry out acts that demonstrate that inner goodness or badness, or sometimes unconsciously do bad things when they are good people, or good things when they are bad. People are just that way. Entrances and exits of beings in our lives. Sometimes with consent, sometimes with reluctance. Sometimes a connection evolves into something else, sometimes it is saying goodbye, having closure. Sometimes it doesn’t close the way we want or expect. Sometimes the goodbye comes without uttering or hearing the words, because you didn’t think it was the end at the time, or you didn’t get a chance to say adieu, for one reason or other. It’s about accepting. Again, it’s a time to let go. Letting go of love and hate, and finding the balance within, a flow state to an equilibrium within your emotions: it seems to be a path to happiness. I’m no expert; I’m just exploring my thoughts. But I feel our minds are wired that way. Obviously, self-love is the objective, rather than self-hate. But trying to find a love or hate in others to satisfy a love or a hole: that seems to be a toxic route we all follow at one stage or another in our lives. Some of us never learn. Managing such emotions is difficult for the most experienced of minds. Realize your triggers and treat yourselves and others with respect and harmony, and from there you can ride the waves of lives storms a little easier, with peace of mind. Where all this comes from is anyone’s guess: a test or calling from the spirits or a chemical reaction that swills somewhere within. You form your own opinion. You, the reader, and I, keep learning. The learning never ends. We absorb the lessons and tread carefully forward. Or at least, that’s what I do, and pass on what I learn to others. Now we have come to the end, we may never know what this post is really about. Maybe I’m untangling my own understanding of love and hate and emotion. Above all, these thoughts came to me while in the shower. Therefore, they are merely shower thoughts. An aqua-inspired flow state.
The Game of Grief
Dear readers, As you can guess from the title, this post is an alternative type of a jolly festive read. I’m sprinkling it all with a bit of jest and dark humour, which is the language I love best. That’s my first disclaimer. The second is that I’m not a qualified counsellor or psychologist, but God help my poor patients if I would ever decide to become one: their spiral might forever descend if their lives were put into my hands. The third disclaimer is that this post has no objective to obtain sympathy or empathy of any sort. I don’t need it. I write through personal experience, logging the journey and memories of mourning in order to support others who have also suffered a loss of some sort, whether it be a death or separation from a loved it, or anything that gives a sense of mourning or disappointment. It is also in dedication to my father, Stephen Arthur Rogers, who passed away on 9th October 2022. As romantic as it sounds, and I know he’s rolling his cynical eyes at me right now while I write these very words, but I feel he’s pushed me to write this. Or in any case, he’s certainly inspired it. Over a year has passed. I haven’t written much publicly about my father other than expressions of grief on social media. I guess it might be that I’ve had too much to say or on my mind, and I didn’t have a blog or the correct medium to express it. I’m not in the business of drama dumping the world with my thoughts. Fuck no, I save that for my nearest and dearest. If we talk about the different stages of grief; by Jaysus, there are anywhere between 5 to 7 to a zillion steps to pass through depending on what and where you read it. On some level, I guess this post is my own way of coming to terms with it: the Acceptance stage. But what I write in the below paragraphs may contradict the last sentence. Because the process of grief is more complex than a step-by-step process. I knew a little something about the grieving process. Just before my father’s death, I was going through separation from my former partner. From that experience alone, I was going through tremendous loss, and as a way to find relief and emotionally and mentally prepare for the pending divorce, I read up on the grieving process to gain insight on what to expect and when. It’s not as though I was walking into it blindly; I’d heard of the 5 or 7 or however many stages there are of grief beforehand, but it all seemed simplistic and unrealistic. We all know, emotions are wretched to grasp, comprehend and control at the best of times. When a big life event comes along, it’s an emotional boxing match: blows all over the body, especially the head. The majority of the websites and self-help guides on grief have their disclaimers before launching into the “5 steps of horrendous mental suffering”, by stating that grieving is never linear, which is very good of them, but also wholly accurate. Grief isn’t linear whatsoever. But still, I felt it was lacking that je ne sais pas quoi. As mentioned above, my father passed away on 9th October. He battled a short but intense fight against lung cancer. I remember in the weeks after the initial diagnosis in early August, I was learning all these terms and what they meant, like CT scans and the use of different dyes and colouring. I learned this-or-that scan may impact if Dad could receive chemotherapy, or that the effects of this-or-that treatment may make dad more poorly for a day or two. There were different types of diagnosis which I never knew existed, and then there was the dreaded term nobody wants to hear about themselves or a loved one: palliative care – end of life. There were different types of nurses and hospital units and treatments flowing through the conversations, and consequences and ifs-and-buts if this-or-that happens: it confused me more, as well as being the worst dictionary exercise ever. My brother and sister were grand, talking me through everything in layman’s terms. They are professional doctors and have witnessed some of this in their day-to-day jobs. It couldn’t have been easy for them having to regurgitate the spiralling bad news and information from the doctors’ technical jargon into words that the rest of the family could comprehend. That comes with its own traumas. Something I will always be grateful to them for. This was all happening during a British autumn. I was not used to the wind and drizzle and greyness, being that these days I am very much a tropical animal, thriving on vitamin D and rays del sol. Still today, in Honduras, on the rare day when temperatures drop and there’s a little drizzle, it evokes something of a melancholic trauma of those final weeks. The dampness and rain and clouds and sitting in cafes at the Royal Worcestershire Hospital drinking shitty coffee waiting for shitty news; I fucking hate those memories with a passion. It still sits in my system rather uncomfortably. I remember the first pangs of grief hit me some weeks before my dad even passed. I sat down for a pint with my best mate Stuart Harbourne in a bar in Birmingham, and he kind of confirmed what I already knew, “Lung cancer: it’s one of the bad ones”. It causes a little sense of guilt in my low moments, that I somehow premeditated or manifested the worst-case scenario. What might have happened if I’d used the power of positive thinking? Would things have turned out differently? Silly, really, I know. Very irrational and absurd. The devil’s work, procrastinating such things. I’m able to rationalise it; don’t worry. After all, I’m not sure how positive-thinking medically prevents the spread of aggressive cancerous