A story about Frustration, Aggression, Mandalas and Candies
It’s a long story but I try to condense it in just 4 sub-stories.
When life started getting so hard?
Even though I had my holidays, this year it’s wasn’t enough to recover and shake out from me the sense of being “fed up” and exhaustion.
My mind couldn’t stop racing and to just notice how much anger and aggression seems to permeate the everyday life.
On the road, at the supermarket, at work, at the restaurant, almost in all places where people have to interact and their action impact others actions, very often we can spot someone who doesn’t care about others, who act in a “you owe me” way.
I hate anger, I hate confrontation, I hate when people argue, particularly for stupid reasons. Usually, I steer clear from those situations but I realized that running away was not healthy.
It was time to recruit my creativity and dig deeper.
So, I started to pay attention, to ask questions when I could and taking notes.
Long story short, looks like that the majority of the situations I witnessed, boiled down to these main 3 excuses.
This is interesting, isn’t it? The next step was to make some research to understand what is behind this and, frustration, seems to be the main one.
I did it the “good old way”, without using AI, googling, talking to people, reading, connecting dots and taking tons of notes. It didn’t take too long to put this together.
This makes a lot of sense to me.
It looks like frustration is not enough to generate aggression BUT, at the same time is a fundamental condition to create it.
Here a couple of sources if you want to read more about this:
Frustration-Aggression hypothesis _ Encyclopaedia Brittannica
So, if one can manage the frustration in first place, thus, can prevent to be aggressive.
Now I need to first hand investigate and experiment with frustration.
Drawing Mandala and managing frustration.
This may sound odd, right?
As usual, when I want to experiment on something, I rely on the first guinea pig I have at hand: myself.
Drawing mandalas looks a very innocuous activity, in reality, it is not. Of course it all depends of the level of precision and accuracy you want to achieve but it can be an unexpected source of frustration.
In a month I have drawn about 50 mandalas, trying different approaches and techniques.
Even though I love drawing mandalas, I clearly noticed the effects of frustration.
What follows is just MY experience.
Of course it was nothing critical or violent, I just threw away some drawings as I usually do but, this time, observing my mood and emotions was eye opening.
One day, I was concentrated on drawing and I already was struggling to get the result I was expecting and then, this happened…
GattoGatto made everything possible to stop me and to get my attention, then he climbed on my shoulder and started purring.
Let me be clear, it’s nothing magic or esoteric, he does this all the time.
BUT, this time, he distracted me by giving me a moment of sweetness and joy.
When he had enough and left, I was calm and joyful and rather than starting again from where I left off, I realized that I was getting everything wrong, not the drawing itself, but the purpose for which I was drawing. From that moment, I made a few changes, my mandalas started to improve and, not to mention, I felt no more frustration.
The Discovery of the Toxic Cycle
What GattoGatto did was not just stopping a cycle, he broke the cycle by injecting something totally alien and positive that diverted the flow.
Yes, but… what cycle are we talking about? Yeah, right.
After the GattoGatto event I started again to collect data and “evidences” by observing myself and other people in confrontational situations.
Based on what I observed I mapped the “Toxic Cycle”.
Use Creativity to Break the Cycle
How I can break the cycle like GattoGatto did?
With sweetness and joy.
Do you remember what Sheldon Cooper said in series 4 episode 11 of BBT?
Ok, the idea is something like that!
It was time for the final experiment!
I had a few Hopjes candies left in my secret stash at home.
They are a present that my dear friend Claire brought me the last time she came to Italy. I DO LOVE those candies but I thought that I could sacrifice a few for a good cause and I put some of them in my bag.
The next days I witnessed, among others, 2 “interesting” events.
Ok, in both cases I put myself between the 2 people and I did this:
It was awesome!!!
Event 1
They stopped bickering and looked at me, flabbergasted
Woman B refused the candy with a polite “No, thank you, I just want pass through” and went away
Woman A took the candy, asked me about the candy then said “Thank you so much” with a big smile
Event 2
They stopped talking and started looking at my face, then at the candies, then at my face again and again for about 10 seconds
Man B took the candy and asked “are you trying to poison us?” , I replied “Not at all. I just wanted to stop your bitter conversation with something sweet”. “Ah, ok” he said, and went on his way.
Man A took the candy. He asked if he can have it after the coffee. We had coffee and then he carefully looked at the candy before eating it. Then he asked “Why you do this? Well, I know why but… Why?”. He smiled and asked me about the candy. He kept the wrap, smiled, said thank you and went his way too
The barista never stopped looking at us like we were aliens
You can’t save the world, but you can make yours and someone else day, one smile and one candy at a time.
I’ll keep doing this and gathering more informations.
What do you do when you are in similar situations?
And, are you up to try yourself the “Share a Smile and a Candy”? Let’s talk about this!
That’s it for this month!
Did you like this newsletter? Please consider to give it a nice like and to forward it to your friends. That would be so helpful and I’m grateful.
In case you are not yet subscribed, you can do it here:
Until next time, take care and be happy!
Mauro
PS: a kind of Colophon
Just a few words about where you can find some of the things I do/did:
Love the way you tie all these stories and concepts together linguistically and visually!
Great stories Mauro! Made me smile