Skip to main content

Hate

There is something about the way hate consumes you. It locks you in a state of mind that cuts out everything else around you. Your whole mind is focused on that object of hate, how it wronged you, trampled on you while sadistically benefiting from your pitiful state. As you recall event after event, suddenly very word and action it spouted had an intent to hurt you and bring you down. These events are interpreted to justify opinions you have about it. More events, more feelings of despair and humiliation and rage.

Your body is very tense. The breath is shallow and quick. Retribution! You mind scrambles for ideas to get back or ways in which you could have got back. You go back to the events and hypothesize alternate scenarios, scenarios that would have turned the tide and made him the victim. You imagine your victim cringing in pain, hiding his face in embarrassment and most importantly regretting having ever hurt you. You feel the triumph of having restored justice. But wait, not yet, What instead of this, I had done this? More scenarios. More feelings of elation.

But wait, what if it was not him who had wronged? What if it was me?

You pick up the phone. You carve out an apology message. That weight inside you lessens. The hate subsides. The heart softens. There is a sense of relief.

There is a sense of true triumph.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

An Ode to Marriage

I remember pondering about the need for marriage during a certain period of my life. Partially inspired by stoicism, I saw a man as an island in a big ocean, continuously being battered by the waves and storms, but holding fort and growing strong with each test. It was also when the idea of monasticism greatly appealed to me, to leave behind, for the lack of a better work, the bullshit of society and trying to attain enlightenment.  Somehow that idea fell apart after a brief meditation stint in a monastery, but the idea of marriage I resisted. The freedom that came from being single seemed too precious to let go. Furthermore life was complicated as it is. Why complicate it further by introducing another person to that life, someone who would bring her own mannerisms, rules, habits, many that might end up conflicting with your own. However, a lot of these ideas and beliefs start to die when friends of yours each start getting into their own relationships and have no more time for yo...
Post a Comment
Read more

Sparing the Rod

 She gave me a look of deep displeasure, not very atypical of the look most members of the opposite gender gave me. “You know you can’t do that in Germany?”, she asserted with the same authority my mother used to tell me about not messing around in her kitchen.  “Yes I am aware”, I meekly responded, knowing well that any kind of argument about this would not end well, so it was better to close off the topic quietly and unlike the kitchen, I could not afford to get kicked out of Germany. She was not the first to respond with such hostility to what seemed like the most natural of things in my experience. The last one who told me the same was a teacher I had met at a party. When she sounded shocked that I was ok with it and said it was not right, I (with some alcoholic courage) had retorted, “How would you discipline them then if they do something wrong?” “I would tell them I am very disappointed with them”. I almost laughed. However, that was very much the theory of my new frien...
Post a Comment
Read more

On the road to Brandenburg

“Aint no sunshine when she’s gone”. “Aint warm when she’s away”. The music floated from somewhere on the platform as our train paused at the station before it moved onto its final destination to Berlin Brandenburg airport. Up to that moment, the trip at daybreak had been filled with the typical unspoken marital tension. A tension that originated from differing expectations on how to prepare for a trip back home, a trip I had decided to skip this time and a trip that would be her first, alone and across continents. Though like all disagreements, the current one brought up memories of past ones, adding fuel to a fire that if left alone, would have died on its own. As even Winnie the Pooh rightfully knew, “Sometimes the smallest things takes up the most space in your heart”. So the fire persisted silently as terrible May seemed to encroach into June. Till Bill Withers husky voice floated into my ears with the lyrics I had heard countless times before. The only difference being up to then ...
Post a Comment
Read more