Love is the Answer to Everything
I got pretty angry during lockdown. I guess what I glimpsed was the experience of people who spend all day on Twitter, in fact many of us did. The experience of being siloed, anxious and unhappy with what is going on, unable to get the fresh air of in-person perspective and bombarded with extreme opinions and constantly presented with a world in a combative, divisive set of binaries.
I also had a neighbour who spent literally every single day of lockdown for two years swinging the most unbelievably loud power tools around like a shaved ape, achieving not a lot except a loud noise, and converting everyone within a half mile’s garden into a thoroughly unpleasant place to be at a time when such a place was all you had to go. Even the most patient of neighbours might have found anger hard to avoid. While I successfully restrained myself for the duration, the neighbours behind us yelled at him over the fence, to no avail.
Yet while anger may be a justifiable response at times, it is largely fruitless and unpleasant. In Dante’s Divine Comedy the angry are condemned to be forever tearing one another to pieces in a dirty river, a metaphor that seems apt. We know that anger lateralises to the left hemisphere of the brain, which unlike the right contains less broad perspective attention and…
