I have ten children. My smacking upside the head of the crazy-making irrational immature humans is almost always metaphorical ... gravity handles it. (Mary W. didn’t hit people much, either. She was more likely to try to kill herself.)
I wish that the Golden Rule worked. So did Mary. She was trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean and reverent. She died at 38 from an infection that could have been avoided if doctors had washed their hands.
It doesn’t help to be angry, but I am.
LOL!
When I was young, and had gone through a very bad time - deaths of people I loved, failure at goals - I was walking in the woods one day, and the thought came to me:
‘You can just drop everything that you’re worried about, and move on. Just drop it - you don’t have to care anymore.”
It was kind of a revelation; I realized that all the stuff I cared so intensely about, wasn’t really that important - goals that hadn’t been achieved, sadness from losses that couldn’t be retrieved - it wasn’t really that important. I could start over, and begin to care about other, more hopeful things - not the dead things, but things that had FUTURE in them. My life picked up, then; I had learned to always move forward, and not waste time and energy in negative emotions.
Give up ‘Angry’. It’s simply not useful - from any REASONable standpoint ;-)
Once you stop expecting ‘returns’ on your virtue, and simply exercise virtue from the impulse of simple Love, the returns flow in.
I’ve always loved The Sermon On The Mount, where Jesus said this:
“Can any of you, however much you worry, add one single hour to your span of life?”
(Of course, I don’t have ten children; and I can’t imagine the grief ;-)
-JT