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Today's
Meditation:
Hate
is one of the strongest emotions around, yet one that has
no real benefits for anyone. Hatred is one of the
destructive emotions, and it can harm not only the person
who feels it, but those people who love him or her,
too. Our souls most definitely become narrow when we
allow hatred to be a part of who we are, and our souls
degrade quickly when we're in its grasp.
We
use the word "hate" quite loosely. "I
hate that food," or "I hate that guy," we
say, not speaking of true hatred, but of dislike.
Perhaps this looseness with the word has kept us from
staying aware of the dangers of feeling the true emotion--
or rather, of allowing the true emotion to
control us. For that it does-- hatred controls us and
our emotions, and when it's in charge of us we become
miserable creatures indeed. We lose our brightness,
we lose touch with much of our positive sides, we lose our
ability to live our lives fully.
Booker
has it right: we permit people to hurt us when they
can make us hate them. No matter what someone else
has done, it's still our choice whether we're going to
sacrifice a piece of our humanity to hate that person, or
whether we're going to maintain our humanity and not
narrow ourselves through hatred.
We
always have a choice, and once we permit someone else to
make us hate them, we've lost that choice-- or at least we
haven't exercised it fully. Hatred never does anyone
any good, so why would we allow ourselves to become less
than we can be because of someone else's actions or words?
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