There’s so much to be annoyed about these days. At least that’s how it feels. I myself am constantly annoyed. I’m annoyed at the way everyone else drives, why my kids won’t just do what I tell them to do, why the world is in never-ending turmoil lurching from one disaster to the next, and the fact my favorite sports team isn’t doing so hot since Tom Brady left town.
Being constantly annoyed is nothing to brag about. Even though I manage to fire off an occasional, funny rant, it’s not exactly a winsome quality. It’s stressful, prideful, and induces an attitude of cynicism.
To make it all so much worse, the news-makers and politicians have figured out that people who are constantly annoyed and on edge are easy prey. If the news feeds us a stream of bad news because the "stock market is crashing," or "World War III is starting," we’ll become glued to the television. Advertising dollars go up.
If politicians scare us about the other party because the “Nazis” or “Communists” are about to take control, we’ll vote, volunteer, and donate more. At the very least, they’ll get some of that sweet, sweet attention we all crave.
Start investigating
Knowing how dangerous it is to have become the Platonic Form of Annoyance, I’ve been working really hard over the last decade or so to change my approach. These days, when someone annoys me, I take it as a cue to start an investigation. I want to know why I’m annoyed, what triggered it, and how to cease and desist.
I investigate until it clicks that there isn’t really all that much to be annoyed about. People make mistakes. No one is perfect. This world is not our home. Life is good. Even when I don’t get my way or I do suffer unjustly, life is still good. This realization and my subsequent ability to let go of annoyance is all thanks to my investigative method.
I took the method from a 20th-century philosophy named Simone Weil, who was born into an upper-middle class French family in 1909 with not much to be annoyed about. Still, she managed to get herself worked up.
As a young girl, she refused to eat sugar in solidarity with the troops entrenched on the Western Front during World War I. As a teenager, she became a socialist and pacifist, constantly annoyed about how violent and unjust governments had become. She may have had a point, because soon enough Hitler arrived on the scene, an evil requiring a far stronger reaction than mere annoyance. It was an evil that affected her personally, as the Weil family had to flee to the United States. Not long after, she tried to create a brigade of women to parachute onto the front lines and assist wounded soldiers. She never got to make a jump, though, because she was diagnosed with tuberculosis. Still a young woman, she wasted away and died in 1943.
From annoyance to peace
The interesting thing is that, as her life became more challenging and her suffering increased greatly, she became less annoyed about it all. She became a peaceful contemplative, ever more appreciative of beauty and love.
It seems to me that, in life, we all have opportunities to be annoyed. Some of those opportunities are legit and others not so much. Sometimes, we just like to be annoyed. When we’re in the habit of it, it’s an easy vice to indulge. I know people who are constantly complaining and always on edge. Other people, whose personal circumstances are far more difficult and unfair, never complain. Not even a single word. In the end, we cannot control exterior circumstances. We can only control how we react.
This is where Weil’s investigative method comes in.
Stop and focus
Her philosophical writings can be summarized as a plea to pay attention. For her, attention meant forgetting about our own selves for a moment, slowing down, waiting, and giving unwavering focus. When something annoys us, it’s a cue to pause and pay attention.
Personally, I’ve found that when I’m annoyed, there’s always a reason -- often a disordered emotion within myself like pride, impatience, or hurt feelings -- and that reason unveils itself only once I pay attention and make an investigation.
Annoyance is an instinctual reaction caused by the ego. I’m inconvenienced. I’m feeling hurt. I’m feeling stressed. This is an important point, because the subject of the investigation is not only the interior self, trying to justify the reaction but, equally, it’s an investigation of the annoyance. We must empty ourselves out and look outward.
Out and up
This all seems straightforward enough. Here’s where Weil is surprising, though. She insists that our investigative gaze not only go outward but also upward. When we’re annoyed, we should give the feeling over to God and allow it to be transformed by his love. The investigation changes from a cynical search to uncover what bothers us, into an empathetic search to apply the transformative power of love. Attention is a positive, encouraging gaze that seeks in that other person or event a cause for joy.
Attention, says Weil, “constitutes the creative faculty in man,” and she also explains, “the amount of creative genius in any period is strictly in proportion to the amount of extreme attention.”
In other words, a person’s greatness lies in forgetting about the self in favor of attentiveness to the other. In forgetting about ourselves we paradoxically begin to create, including becoming more ourselves. Attentive love is a sacrifice in which we lose nothing and gain everything.
As Christians, we’re called to attentive focus with a mind toward increasing the love of God in the world, not searching for reasons to drum up righteous indignation and annoyance. Seen this way, causes for annoyance are a divine gift. The negative feelings stirred up within us are an opportunity to launch an investigation and change ourselves for the better.
