Of all the disturbances a person can suffer, Seneca judged anger the most ruinous, and in his treatise on it he sets down a remedy so plain it is easy to overlook.
The greatest remedy for anger is delay.
Not suppression, not a clever retort held in reserve, not winning the argument — simply time. Anger feeds on speed; it wants to strike while it is still hot, before the cooler faculties can be consulted. Rob it of the first moment and much of its force drains away.
He illustrates the point with a scene from the life of the philosopher Plato, who once found himself furious at a servant's fault. Plato raised his hand to strike and then stopped, holding it in the air, standing oddly still. A friend who came upon him asked what he was doing. He answered that he was exacting punishment from an angry man — meaning himself. He would not act while the anger was in command. The blow, had it fallen, would have belonged to the passion and not to the person; so the hand simply waited until the person returned.
This is what makes the counsel more than a trick for cooling down. The pause is not empty. In it, the thing that anger had made to look enormous shrinks to its real size; the insult turns out to be smaller, the offender more careless than cruel, the stakes lower than they felt. Delay is the interval in which judgment, which anger had shouldered aside, quietly takes its seat again.
The tradition of early Buddhism presses the same discipline to its furthest edge. In the discourse known as the simile of the saw, the Buddha asks his listeners to imagine bandits severing a person limb from limb with a two-handled saw, and says that even then, anyone whose mind was corrupted by hatred would have failed to follow his teaching. The training he prescribes is severe: the mind is to remain unaffected, no bitter word is to escape, and goodwill is to be kept even toward the ones holding the saw. The point is not to endure cruelty cheerfully but to show how deep the practice of patience is meant to run — that no provocation, however extreme, is granted the power to own the mind that meets it.
Between the thing that is done to a person and the thing the person does in return there is always a small gap — narrow when the anger is fresh, wider the longer it is left alone. Nearly everything worth calling freedom seems to live in that gap. The one who can hold it open, even for a single breath, is no longer merely being acted upon.