When Someone Treats You Unfairly, Do Not Make It Worse for Yourself

Today, someone at work made a thoroughly unreasonable complaint about me.

I cannot go into the details, but it made me angrier than I had been in a long time. It was the kind of incident that made me want to say, “You have got to be kidding me.”

At times like this, I try to remember a Buddhist teaching.

It is the story of the first arrow and the second arrow.

You Cannot Avoid the First Arrow, but You Shoot the Second One Yourself

Buddhism contains a teaching that compares human suffering to being struck by two arrows.

The first arrow is pain that comes from outside us. Illness, accidents, and unfair treatment by other people are among the events we cannot avoid in life.

The second arrow is the additional suffering we create by dwelling on what happened.

In this case, the unreasonable complaint at work was the first arrow.

There was nothing I could do about that. I cannot control what another person chooses to say.

The problem was what happened afterward.

I kept replaying the same scene in my head, thinking, “What on earth were they thinking?” and “Why should I have to listen to something like that?”

The person was no longer in front of me. Yet inside my head, they kept reappearing and making the same complaint over and over again.

And every time, I became angry all over again.

They had complained only once, but I was rebroadcasting it on my own and making myself relive the unpleasant experience repeatedly.

When you think about it, the whole thing is rather ridiculous.

Do Not Hold a Postmortem While You Are Still Angry

At a time like this, it is tempting to analyze what happened and ask, “Why did this happen?” or “Was I partly at fault?”

But there is no way to conduct a calm analysis while you are still angry.

As I think about it, I remember the person’s tone and attitude, and I become angry again. Before I know it, instead of analyzing anything, I am arguing with them inside my head.

This time, I imagine defeating them in the argument as I continue a conversation that has already ended in real life.

None of that changes the past by even a millimeter.

Any necessary reflection or preventive action can wait until I have calmed down. At the very least, there is no need to hold a postmortem by myself while I am still furious.

Keep Your Brain Busy to Forget Something Unpleasant

So how can we prevent the second arrow?

Simply deciding to stop thinking about something does not work so easily. In fact, the harder we try to forget it, the more readily it comes back to mind.

My solution is to fill my head with something else.

Eating something delicious can help, as can immersing yourself in something you enjoy.

In my case, one surprisingly effective method is watching a program in English.

When I watch television in Japanese, I have enough mental space to think about something else at the same time. With English, that is not possible.

My English is not good enough to understand without concentrating, especially when there are no subtitles.

In other words, simply understanding the English uses up a considerable amount of my brain’s processing capacity.

Strangely enough, that leaves me with no room to think about what made me angry at work.

I can study English and forget something unpleasant at the same time. I consider it a rather efficient method.

You Are Not Obliged to Take the Second Arrow Too

When you work with other people, unreasonable things will inevitably happen.

You cannot control everything other people say or do. But whether you replay the incident in your head for hours is up to you.

There was no avoiding the first arrow. But there is no need to shoot yourself with the second one.

So I am going to stop thinking about work for today and watch a program in English instead.

Of course, if I start getting angry because I cannot understand the English, that will be a third arrow in its own right.