Hate and a bag of potatoes

Finish this sentence…”I hate ________.”  And then just put that off to the side for now…

My husband told me about an article he read recently.  In full disclosure, I didn’t go find the article to read it myself because the point of it was loud, clear and brilliant.  I’ve been thinking about it ever since and decided to share it here.

A teacher had her students put one potato for each person that they hated in a bag.  Students had a range from one up to eight potatoes in their bag.  The teacher then told them they had to carry the bag around with them everywhere, absolutely everywhere, they went for a week.  After a few days, the students started to complain about how heavy the bags were and how it was cumbersome to carry them absolutely everywhere.  Then the potatoes started to rot.  You know the smell of a rotting potato…gross.  They still had to finish out the week carrying around their load of heavy, stinky, rotting potatoes.

I’ll encourage you to pause here and think about the brilliance of what she did.  Maybe even take a moment to imagine how many potatoes you’d put in your bag and what it would be like to carry it around. ALL. THE. TIME.

I would suggest that you maybe even add potatoes for all of the people you envy, because for me that is a twisted form of hate.  Did your bag just get a big heavier?

My husband and I debated whether envy should be included.  Here is the rationale that I gave him.  As you know from previous blogs, I have people in my life whom I consider to be difficult to deal with (I’ve gone so far as to refer to them as bullies).  Their behaviour towards me would indicate that they hate me.  I’ve been told that they are likely treating me this way because they envy me and/or my position (whether that be at work or in life in general).  So, in my mind, having envy causes people to treat people they envy like they hate them.  You decide.

The potato experiment reminds me of Bruno Mars’ video for “Grenade”.  The song is about a one-sided relationship, but in the video he drags a piano around with him everywhere including a steep uphill walk.  The visual representation of the “baggage” of our extreme emotions really struck me.  Brilliant.

I remember when I was a child my parents said that hate is very close to love.  Both are fiery, all-consuming, almost irrational emotions. (Side note: after thinking about this and growing up to experience love in its many forms, I realize they meant the first stirrings of passionate love when you don’t think rationally and you make stupid decisions and take risks). They said this to me when a boy was teasing me and I didn’t like it.  They were right, in that eventually he admitted he was “in love” with me (we were in Grade 2!). It scared me and I believe I likely broke his heart when I told him I hated him for teasing me and promptly stomped away with indigence.  He moved away and I always felt bad after that.

The key point here is that it scared me. And to me, that’s what drives hate.  We hate things we don’t understand, things that are different than us, things that we can’t control.  So, our “go-to” is to not like that/them.  If we take the time to learn, to understand, to talk, to find compassion, and to share, we would find out that we are all the same.  We are humans on this planet sharing a life experience.  We all have the same emotions. But our survival instincts kick in the “negative”, potentially life-preserving emotions when we don’t understand something and we feel threatened by it.

I did a course this week on Business Writing (bear with me, it applies).  In that course, the instructor said that when we write for business, we have a tendency to write in a negative tone.  Why? We are conditioned to do it.  First, it’s from our lingering survival instinct.  Second, in a study done by Jack Canfield, the average child hears more than 400 negative words a day and less than 20 positive words a day.  I repeat; more than 400 negative and less than 20 positive word PER DAY! Now we are all going to pay attention to our interactions and tone as we move through our day and to that I say, “you’re welcome”!

Hate (and being negative all the time) is exhausting.  Carrying around those potatoes all the damn time is exhausting.  How can we lighten our load? We can start by asking questions and understanding things outside of ourselves.  Once we understand, we lose some (or hopefully all) of the fear.  Now, I’m not saying that you will agree with everyone or everything out there.  But if you have an understanding, can see where the other side is coming from, get the big picture (some would even say, “get your head out of your ass”) then we can at least tamper our fiery, knee-jerk emotions and lighten our load.

My husband and I talked about the word hate.  First he responded by saying, “I hate everybody who hates!”. Funny guy. But our conversation led us to look it up.  Merriam Webster’s primary meaning of the word hate is:  “intense hostility and aversion usually deriving from fear, anger, or sense of injury”.  (I looked that up after I equated it to fear so yay for me!). Both of us agreed that it’s a very intense word that we very rarely use. Both of us also agreed that we don’t hate any person.  Although we have people in our lives that we don’t like, don’t respect or have an aversion to because of their negative vibe, we don’t actually hate anyone; the emotion isn’t that strong.  It’s too exhausting to hold on to that strong of an emotion. We don’t want anything to have that much hold over us and our emotions; which impacts our wellbeing.   And it doesn’t hurt anyone but ourselves.  I also feel like no one deserves that much energy from me. Drop the bag of potatoes.

Sometimes it’s not people but things or situations.  My husband has often said that he hates grapefruit.  But he felt he was being too hard on grapefruit after thinking about the harshness in his words.  He doesn’t like the taste of grapefruit but he doesn’t actually hate it.  Just because he lacks the gene to appreciate a delicious, juicy, tart fruit shouldn’t make him hate it.  They now have an understanding and grapefruit is not part of his diet.

I’ve said that I hate winter.  But there are things about winter that I do like: snuggling up with a book and cup of tea by the fire, preparing comfort foods like stews and soups, watching movies and eating popcorn. I even like to get outside to snowshoe if it’s not too cold.  So, I don’t actually hate winter; I don’t like to be cold.  I don’t have control over the temperature, but I do have control over making decisions to stay warm.  It felt really good to drop that potato.

At the end of the day, I wanted to make you think because haters don’t have to hate.  And carrying around a bag of potatoes can drag us down like the piano tied to our leg.

Finish this sentence…”I hate  _________”.