A few days ago, I was tail-gated by a woman in an SUV. As I looked at her face through the rear-view mirror, I could see the I-wanna-get-there-now look—squinting deep-set brown eyes glaring straight ahead, fingers of both hands gripping the left and right curves of the wheel, jaw jutting forward like the prow of a racing yacht, her entire face angled to the right as she appeared to bite off a thin slice of skin from the inside corner of her lower lip.

In that jet-stream moment, as I approached the red light, I was ready. My thoughts shifted into first, the power gear. She’s gonna slide into the inside lane. She’s gonna rev her monster tank-of-a-gas-guzzler. She’s gonna roll down her window for the duel, pin her hair back, tighten her seat belt, light a cigarette.

Just as I stopped at the light, I could see her car swerve to the right as she darted around the corner out of my view. I was defeated, a lonely old-fart road-warrior in the middle of a green zone two months after the enemy surrendered.

Resentments are like that. They stay glued to the rear-view mirror. They create scenarios. They carry on monologues. They stand alone, bereft, at a red light, waiting, just waiting for some new jerk-du-jour, an old enemy in a new uniform, to pull up snarling and spewing on the inside lane, ready for bear, as they say.

And, when no one takes the bait, when the war is over, when the enemies surrender and go home to their families and cozy-warm fireplaces, the resenting prison-guard in us still waits for a new-and-improved inmate to show up.

When do we surrender our resentments? Why do we hang on to them like some tsunami victim clenching both hands around a frail branch in an eighty-mile-an-hour rain-drenched wind. Why do we carry on bitter monologues about an ex, an abusive father, and indifferent mother, a hypocritical boss?

No one wants to admit that our circuitry is often tightly wired to be fatally attracted to resentments. We know they cause us emotional pain, but we also know that we have identified so long with the pain, that we can’t seem to live without it. It is our demon lover.

Resentments love to feed off the carrion of the absent who are never present to defend themselves. In a perverse way, they nurture us into some form of dry-drunk strength. We can win the battle against those we resent by mentally debating them into defeat while, at the same time, wishing them a safe return so that we can continue the love-hate match.

Resentment narratives are also like mantras. They have that below-the-breath hum that soothes the victim in us, the victim that rallies to all our imagined victories in the shower, at a red light, along a beach, on the golf course, in between the paragraphs of a novel or a magazine article.

Resentments are all about the winner/victim in us as we crush the resented enemy into embarrassed silence in our mental scripts. Or we allow them to erupt into a full-blown duelling scene during those silent moments on our commuter-drive home.

The problem, of course, is that, too often, we continue to fight the battle of our resentments—in our heads and hearts, as we refuse to leave the fray.

And just how do we give up an old resentment, the surrender that trains us for living with the emotional fall-out we are bound to experience with all the new potential resentments out there in our daily lives? Can we ever blossom into a chronic state of what the ancient mystics would call the “love-overflow”?—that tender, malleable, child-like side of ourselves that is quick to forgive and forget?

The first step to emotional health, they say, is to love oneself. And love, we all know, is always abundant, if we allow it. Our psyches do not have to be Elmer-glued to victimization or self-loathing just as we do not have to live on the battlefield of getting even, of conquering, of psychologically annihilating those we resent.

Mind you, I’m the kind of guy who avoids Netflix DVDs that say “enchanting” on them, so I’m not advocating a daily love-feast, a gooey-eyed, tingly feeling that my day should be sprinkled to death with false joy. I’ll leave that to some of the Armani-suited motivational speakers.

But I am talking about a practice of imagining the tender-child in me, left on the doorstep of reality, picked up in a basket by an archetypal mother who nurses me to life from her breast of all breasts, the universal manna to those who have only known the doorstep.

Yes, we must reimagine, recreate, reframe the old narratives, but we cannot do it alone. We just can’t sit at a red light or stand in the shower and self-will our psyches into a new day. We must be constantly in the presence of others by talking to them, living their crises, sharing their joys.

Even if that “other” is a photo of a thinning-diseased AIDS four-year old in a bone-racked frame-of-a-body looking up at the camera with large, round, black eyes or the fatalistic terror and grief of two teenagers holding each other in a parking lot, tears of terror and grief streaming down their ravaged, sagging cheeks, as they gaze down at the tangled body of their father.

We cannot, we simply cannot, live in the quicksand of hate and resentment, struggling to be free by wrestling with the demons of those who have wronged us or whom we have imagined have wronged us; we all know what happens when quicksand victims try to resist.

But we can surrender the enemy, we can give up the fight, not because we can self-will anything into existence but because we have opened ourselves up to caring for ourselves and compassionately reaching into the griefs and joys of others.

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