The notebook · September 24, 2026

What is left in the morning

There is a line of Paul’s I have known all my life and had never once tried.

Be angry, and don’t sin. Don’t let the sun go down on your wrath.

Ephesians 4:26 (World English Bible)

In English it does not ask permission. It gives it, and then draws a line. Be angry. I had filed the whole thing under instructions for people who live alone and go to bed at peace. A fortnight ago I decided to keep it for seven evenings running, to see.

The first thing I found out, immediately, is that I could settle almost nothing. On the evenings I was angry, the person concerned was unreachable, or asleep, or had no idea there was anything to settle. Twice out of seven the anger was not aimed at anyone in particular. Once it was aimed at me.

So by the second evening I read the line more closely. It does not say be reconciled before nightfall. It says nothing about the other person at all. The possessive sits entirely on my side: your wrath. The deadline is on what I am holding, not on what we repair. That is far narrower than I thought, and far less comfortable, because it removes the excuse I had ready, the one about it taking two.

What was left to me, then, was the only half that was mine: stopping the rerun. Not forgiving, not putting it in perspective, not deciding it did not matter. Stopping the preparation of what comes next. Setting the anger down as it was, with whatever is fair in it and whatever is inflated, without tidying it up first.

I will not claim I slept well. Two evenings it made no difference whatsoever.

What surprised me was the morning. When I fall asleep on a fully argued anger, I wake up with the argument. It is there, intact, ready to be used again, and the day opens with a closing speech to a court that is not sitting. On the evenings I had put the thing down without building the case, I woke up to the anger with nothing on it. Usually smaller. Once, frankly absurd. Once, not absurd at all, and that was the only morning I knew what to do about it during the day.

I do not know whether this is what Paul meant. All I can report is that it is not the anger that grows in the night, it is what we build around it.

On the seventh evening I did not need the rule. On the eighth I did, and I did not keep it.

In Manna, one prayer a day, at the hour you take it.