Canter Bridge

The proverbs teach, more often than not, by laying beside each other parallel realities that normally pass unnoticed. Practical wisdom resides in the similar patterns that link what we customarily consider independent realms of life, nature, and the like.

Take pressing, for example, as Proverbs 30.33 does. The New Revised Standard Version is to be commended for consistently translating the three-times-present Hebrew word מיץ (miyts) as pressing. Other translators have felt the need to overcome the potential monotony of the thing and so have risked obscuring the neat parallel upon which the proverb depends.

For as pressing milk produces curds,
and pressing the nose produces blood,
so pressing anger produces strife.

Pressing a thing that might otherwise be left alone consistently produces a result that, by most angles of vision, is not inherent in the thing itself. Pressing is thus transformative, whether for good or for ill.

One might not have expected, on the surface of things where the most culinarily challenged of us live, that applying pressure to milk should produce curds. To the uninitiated, it comes as a bit of a surprise.

Simlarly, a nose has a purpose and identity all its own. It does not come as a natural suggestion to wail on it. But when unusual circumstances lead one to do just this, the nose—otherwise unassociated with blood—runs red with the liquid.

So, anger. We have been told ad nauseum to name it, to process it, to deal with it, to articulate it, to bring it to the surface lest it do its lethal work against the innocent and unsuspecting. There is of course truth and some measure of health in this.

But the proverb also knows that, if pressed, anger can render a product that is not inherent in it: strife.

There is wisdom in knowing when to let milk remain milk, to allow the nose to get on with being the breathing, smelling oddity on a friend’s face that it finds its strange purpose in being.

There is, too, a moment for letting anger’s sleeping dogs lie. You may press on it if you like. Be prepared, then, for the alchemy that turns anger into the more-wide ranging carnivore we call strife.