Stillness Is the Key by Ryan Holiday

pressure, the overworked heart, inching us closer to the attack that
will put us in the hospital or the grave.
We can pretend we didn’t hear or see things that were meant to
offend. We can move slowly, giving extreme emotions time to
dissipate. We can avoid situations and people (and even entire cities)
where we know we tend to get upset or pissed off. When we feel our
temper rising up, we need to look for insertion points (the space
between stimulus and response). Points where we can get up and
walk away. When we can say, “I am getting upset by this and I would
like not to lose my cool about it,” or “This doesn’t matter and I’m not
going to hold on to it.” We can think even of the Mr. Rogers verse
about anger:

It’s great to be able to stop

When you’ve planned a thing that’s wrong,

And be able to do something else instead

And think this song

As silly as those lyrics might seem to us in the moment, as our
temper is boiling over, are they any worse than a grown adult losing
their cool over some minor slight? Are they worse than saying or
doing something that will haunt us, possibly forever?
Not that regret minimization is the point of managing our
temper, although it is an important factor. The point is that people
who are driven by anger are not happy. They are not still. They get in
their own way. They shorten legacies and short-circuit their goals.
The Buddhists believed that anger was a kind of tiger within us,
one whose claws tear at the body that houses it. To have a chance at
stillness—and the clear thinking and big-picture view that defines it
—we need to tame that tiger before it kills us. We have to beware of
desire, but conquer anger, because anger hurts not just ourselves but
many other people as well. Although the Stoics are often criticized for
their rigid rules and discipline, that is really what they are after: an
inner dignity and propriety that protects them and their loved ones
from dangerous passions.