dealing with valid anger

How… should [we] deal with… valid anger? I counsel a five-step process: (1) consciously acknowledge to yourself that you are angry; (2) restrain your immediate response; (3) locate the focus of your anger; (4) analyze your options; and (5) take constructive action. As we complete each step, we move toward making our anger productive.

Gary D. Chapman

Anger: Handling a Powerful Emotion in a Healthy Way.  Moody Publishers. 2007.

courageous pine

Courageous pine-

enduring the snow

that is piling up,

color unchanging.

Let people be like this.

Hirohito. Emperor Shōwa

Embracing Defeat: Japan in the wake of World War II. By John Dower. W.W. Norton and Company. 1999. p.317-318 

In heralding the advent of each new year, the [Japanese] court customarily assigned a thematic topic on which members of the imperial household as well as ordinary people would compose thirty-one-syllable waka, with commoners invited to submit their verses for evaluation by experts assembled by the court. Early in the new year, the best poems would be published alongside waka by the emperor and other eminent figures - a high honor indeed for an amateur poet. In October of that year of bitter defeat (1945), it was announced that the theme for the coming year's poem would be "snow on the pine," a classic image of beautiful endurance. Above is the emperor's own poem, widely disseminated in the media on January 22.

if he can do it, I can do it

My father [John Bradley] told me about the challenge of this experience [...the stomach-wrenching, terrifying process of climbing down the webbing of cargo nets pitched over the sides of the great transport ships - every step of the climb encumbered by heavy packs - and securing a seat in one of the smaller landing crafts that would carry the men into the shallow water and to the edge of the beach] once when I was a young man. It was one of the very few times he ever spoke of his wartime life, and that fact made it even more memorable to me.

He told of clinging for dear life to the webbing, trying to choke back nausea and disabling terror, as he followed the back of the next Marine down. "I kept saying to myself, 'If he can do it, I can do it,'" my father told me.

So much of what all these boys would do over the next months, so much of their survival, so much of their sanity in the midst of murderous chaos, would come down to just that: following the back of the next Marine. If he could do it, they could do it.

James Bradley

Flags of Our Fathers: Heroes of Iwo Jima. May 2000. p.117

no uninteresting things

Where to discover your interest and how to amass relevant information are illustrated in the story of an obscure spinster woman who insisted that she never had a chance. She muttered these words to Dr. Louis Agassiz, distinguished naturalist, after one of his lectures in London. In response to her complaint, he replied: 

“Do you say, madam, you never had a chance? What do you do?”

“I am single and help my sister run a boardinghouse.”

“What do you do?” he asked.

“I skin potatoes and chop onions.”

He said, “Madam, where do you sit during these interesting but homely duties?”

“On the bottom step of the kitchen stairs.”

“Where do your feet rest?”

“On the glazed brick.”

“What is glazed brick?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

He said, “How long have you been sitting there?”

She said, “Fifteen years.”

“Madam, here is my personal card,” said Dr. Agassiz. “Would you kindly write me a letter concerning the nature of a glazed brick?”

She took him seriously. She went home and explored the dictionary and discovered that a brick was a piece of baked clay. That definition seemed too simple to send to Dr. Agassiz, so after the dishes were washed, she went to the library and in an encyclopedia read that a glazed brick is vitrified kaolin and hydrous aluminum silicate. She didn’t know what that meant, but she was curious and found out. She took the word vitrified and read all she could find about it. Then she visited museums. She moved out of the basement of her life and into a new world on the wings of vitrified. And having started, she took the word hydrous, studied geology, and went back in her studies to the time when God started the world and laid the clay beds. One afternoon she went to a brickyard, where she found the history of more than 120 kinds of bricks and tiles, and why there have to be so many. Then she sat down and wrote thirty-six pages on the subject of glazed brick and tile.

Back came the letter from Dr. Agassiz: “Dear Madam, this is the best article I have ever seen on the subject. If you will kindly change the three words marked with asterisks, I will have it published and pay you for it.”

A short time later there came a letter that brought $250, and penciled on the bottom of this letter was this query: “What was under those bricks?” She had learned the value of time and answered with a single word: “Ants.” He wrote back and said, “Tell me about the ants.”

She began to study ants. She found there were between eighteen hundred and twenty-five hundred different kinds. There are ants so tiny you could put three head-to-head on a pin and have standing room left over for other ants; ants an inch long that march in solid armies half a mile wide, driving everything ahead of them; ants that are blind; ants that get wings on the afternoon of the day they die; ants that build anthills so tiny that you can cover one with a lady’s silver thimble; peasant ants that keep cows to milk, and then deliver the fresh milk to the apartment house of the aristocrat ants of the neighborhood.

After wide reading, much microscopic work, and deep study, the spinster sat down and wrote Dr. Agassiz 360 pages on the subject. He published the book and sent her the money, and she went to visit all the lands of her dreams on the proceeds of her work.

Now, as you hear this story, do you feel acutely that all of us are sitting with our feet on pieces of vitrified kaolin and hydrous aluminum silicate—with ants under them? Lord Chesterton answers: “There are no uninteresting things; there are only uninterested people.”

Keep learning.

Marion D. Hanks

“Good Teachers Matter,” Ensign, Jul 1971, 60

look, look, look

Most unorthodox of all, and crucial as time would tell, was his [Louis Agassiz's] manner of teaching. He intended, he said, to teach students to see - to observe and compare - and he intended to put the burden of study on them. Probably he never said what he is best known for, "Study nature, not books," or not in those exact words. But such certainly was the essence of his creed, and for his students the idea was firmly implanted by what they would afterward refer to as "the incident of the fish."

His initial interview at an end, Agassiz would ask the student when he would like to begin. If the answer was now, the student was immediately presented with a dead fish, usually a very long dead, pickled, evil-smelling specimen - personally selected by "the master" from one of the wide-mouthed jars that lined his shelves. The fish was placed before the student in a tin pan. He was to look at the fish, the student was told, whereupon Agassiz would leave, not to return until later in the day, if at all.

Samuel Scudder, one of the many from the school who would go on to do important work of their own (his in entomology), described the experience as one of life's turning points.

In ten minutes I had seen all that could be seen in that fish.... Half an hour passed - an hour - another hour; the fish began to look loathsome. I turned it over and around; looked it in the face - ghastly; from behind, beneath, above, sideways, at three-quarters view - just as ghastly. I was in despair.

I might not use a magnifying glass; instruments of all kinds were interdicted. My two hands, my two eyes, and the fist it seemed a most limited field. I pushed my finger down its throat to feel how sharp the teeth were. I began to count the scales in the different rows, until I was convinced that that was nonsense. At last a happy thought struck me - I would draw the fish, and now with surprise I began to discover new features in the creature.

When Agassiz returned later and listened to Scudder recount what he had observed, his only comment was that the young man must look again.

I was piqued; I was mortified. Still more of that wretched fish! But now I set myself to my task with a will, and discovered one new thing after another... The afternoon passed quickly; and when, toward its close, the professor: "Do you see it yet?"

"No," I replied, "I am certain I do not, but I see how little I saw before."

The day following, having thought of the fish through most of the night, Scudder had a brainstorm. The fish, he announced to Agassiz, had symmetrical sides with paired organs.

"Of course, of course!" Agassiz replied, "Oh, look at your fish!"

In Scudder's case the lesson lasted a full three days. "Look, look, look." was the repeated injunction and the best lesson he ever had, Scudder recalled, "a legacy the professor has left to me, as he has left it to many others, of inestimable value, which we could not buy, with which we cannot part."

The way to all learning, "the backbone of education," was to know something well. "A smattering of everything is worth little," He would insist in the heavy French accent that he was never to lose. "Facts are stupid things, until brought into conjunction with some general law." It was a great and common fallacy to suppose that an encyclopedic mind is desirable. The mind was made strong not though much learning but by "the thorough possession of something." In other words, "Look at your fish."

David McCullough

Brave Companions: Portraits In History. Simon and Schuster, 1992. p. 25, 26