Dearest Chatterers,

I am blogging in a white heat today, because our car insurance policy was cancelled last week and I need to pay a real-time visit to our insurance agent. Apparently, we missed a small payment by just a few days. On Friday, we received a “refund of payment” check and a grim, impersonal note announcing that our relationship with the company had been terminated.

It’s hard to stay spiritually attuned and calm at times like these.

I’m mostly shocked that the insurance company’s computer system kicked us out so coldly after many years of faithful payment and no insurance claims. Our local agent asks, “Could you come by our office and we’ll fax them a form that will quickly reinstate everything?” His office is in the Bay Ridge area of Brooklyn, a good twenty-five minutes by car from where we live.

At first I was fuming, but now I’m thinking, well, Bay Ridge is very cool, ethnically diverse, and bustling with interesting Italian groceries. Perhaps something good will come–with characteristic divine mystery–from this throbbing pain in the neck.

So I have shed my all-consuming fury. It wasn’t doing me any good. As luck would have it, Robert (Uma’s Buddhist dad) Thurman wrote a wonderful book called “Anger,” which has been sitting on my desk awaiting the right moment to appear in this blog.

“Anger is like fire–it burns you, and it burns others,” he writes in the chapter called “The Yoga of Anger Transcendence.” “It causes you the most harm, wounds you from within, kills your happiness, and is especially hard to defend against since it comes from within yourself–it actually masquerades as yourself. Once you understand this, it simplifies your struggle to discover happiness.”

I’m off to Bay Ridge.