Of Love and Hate

Though the title of this article may lead you to believe otherwise, I would never presume to tell anyone specifically who to love or hate. I have simply composed a small cluster of thoughts on the subject, and I'd like to present these hypotheses for public acceptance, debate, emulsion, or even regurgitation in later pontification.  As I lay only a rudimentary foundation here, I implore anyone reading this to expound upon it, whether you find my logic flawed, luminous, or just flat, bland and unoriginal.

 

I think I should start with the subject of hate.  Too often do I hear the cliché “Hate is a strong word”. No. It is not.  While the pen may be mightier than the sword, the stinging bite of the word “hate” only affects those weak-minded fools who would actually give consideration to the inflammatory nonsense spit out by those who would verbally belittle them.

 

Now, having established that the word itself has no strength, we need to define parameters for actively cultivating hate into a tangible and useful social resource.  Active hate seems to me to be the only useful form of the emotion, so let’s use that as our base ingredient.  This means that if you should decide to hate someone, keeping it to yourself, bottling it up, not sharing this hate will serve no purpose other than to hurt yourself, raise your blood pressure, and possibly give you a bleeding ulcer.  If you hate someone to should take an active approach to demonstrating that hate and exercising it.  Actively ignore the person in regular group activities, attack them financially, emotionally, verbally (if they are of that weak minded sort), and physically (though I only recommend this once your other attacks have goaded them into initiating physical combat).  I am not a fan of using gossip, slander, and other forms of deception, simply because those methods have no honor to them, and more often than not make you seem the lesser person.  The whole point of this exercise is to get everything out in the open anyways, so why not be upfront about it?

 

If we have a means and method of hating, we should now outline targets for our brutality.  I absolutely, ABSOLUTEY DO NOT, advocate hating anyone you do not know.  By this I mean that hate should not be based on any prejudicial terms such as race, religion, politics, gender, or sexual orientation.  Those are the most idiotic and unfounded reasons for hating, and if anything you should hate the bigots who would propagate such philosophies.  I sincerely believe that hate, our active variety of hate, should be solely reserved for people who directly influence your life in a negative manner.  I am referring to people who would steal from you, whether by burglary or by not holding up their end of a bargain; people who would slander you, or otherwise attempt to turn your friends against you; those who would attempt to lull you into blissful ignorance so that they may have an advantage over you.  Personally, I hate stupid people.  As for people who already hate you, I would actually recommend trying to find the seed of their hate and attempting to remove it if at all possible.  Friends are almost always better than enemies, so, if their hate can be cured, do so, but if not, reciprocate superfluously.  The best you can hope for from someone who adamantly hates you is to instill in them a fear that will prevent escalation of any ensuing confrontation.  That is how active hate should be used to quell certain disputes before they become cancerous or blatantly destructive.

 

My last thoughts on this dark subject of hate pertain to cessation.  When should you stop hating a particular subject?  When they stop offending is usually a good time to consider this.  When they apologize for previous offenses is definitely a good point for an armistice.  The one other reason to temper you active rage, is once it has starting consuming other aspects of your life.  Even with the best intentions and practice, hate can become malignant, tiresome, and self-destructive.

 

The subject of love, I suppose, though it is certainly more pleasant to ponder, will not be any lighter of moral intricacies or obligations.  I believe it shares many similarities with hate, to include the passion necessary to fuel either emotion, and the fact that love, like hate, is an emotional tool essential to living a full life.

 

Don’t worry.  I am not going to attempt to indoctrinate you with dogmatic nonsense about why you should love everyone, or love Jesus, or love all the little bunnies of the forest.  I am not going to lie to you and say that love is easy, or that love heals all wounds and voids all transgressions.  I sincerely believe that love lost is more painful than hate realized.  Love whomever you want to love.  The following are just my thoughts on what qualities would be beneficial to find in a loved one.  My one, hopefully pragmatic, metaphor for this emotion is as follows:  Emotions being a set of kitchen knives, hate is obviously the large butcher or cleaver, the sharp blade that is obviously dangerous and therefore, for the most part, wielded with the proper respect and diligence.  Love, though is more often the razor sharp paring knife, deceptive in its size and simplicity to take advantage of.  Using this more regularly lulls us into a false sense of security, and often that tiny blade we take for granted takes more blood from us than the hateful cleaver.

 

Again, defining the evolution of love that we want to examine, dissect, refine, and foment will probably be the best place to start.  Knowing that there are countless varieties of love I want to limit this essay to examining the types that are reserved solely for other sentient beings (humans whom are both alive, and conscious), and that involve enough of an investment to cause distress should they ever dissolve.  As reference, in my life this love would include most of my family, my friends in my inner circle of trust, and my imaginary girlfriend, Layla, though she can get a bit jealous at times.  Hopefully without causing one to question the validity of my gruff, macho, testosterone laden, rugged image, I will admit that the loss of any of these people would leave me distraught, and, if not immediately then certainly once I felt the gravity, bring me to tears.

 

Let’s label this love as either strong familial love, or passionate romantic love, being that either of the varieties fulfills our prerequisites.  Most people have had at least some experience with this potent form of love, and most have lost people they felt this for and therefore know the pain it causes.  So now the question is, who really deserves such a sacrifice on the part of the lover?  The answer, by my recommendation, is very few.  In my mind the active practice of loving someone, and the realization of the qualities that deem one worthy of love are so intertwined that they seem to only occur simultaneously. So, before I can fully explain how to recognize a viable target of affection, I must explain my thoughts on what I will refer to as “active love”. 

 

Love, again like hate, is defined not by the word, but by the actions of the lover.  If you are unsure as to what loving actions are I seriously doubt that any essay will be able to aid you, but I will mention some general concepts that I practice that may seem fairly simple and yet often are over looked.  

 

First of all, the shoulder concept.  Few things aggravate me more than listening to people cry, bitch, moan, break down when I just don’t care.  Seriously.  Sometimes I laugh out of place because I don’t care so much, and the absurdity of the situation finally makes me temporarily manic.  That being said, when someone I love comes to me with a problem, or with a burdened mind, or simply to vent, I listen, and listen intently.  I would hope that they can tell how closely I am listening, because I often ask questions, sometimes offer suggestions, and almost always say something silly for sole purpose of getting them to laugh (even if it is short-lived).

 

Then there is the entertainment concept.  This is practically the mirror image of the “shoulder” concept.  Not only will I listen to you talking about your most depressing situations, I will share my best stories, my funniest and typically most self-demeaning anecdotes, and my most outrageously fantastic “true” stories with you if you are among the few I love.  Whether I am a decent story teller or not, and whether the story is funny or just obscure is utterly irrelevant, the point is in the effort, the act of sharing something that I think you might enjoy.  In fact, I know that most of my stories start off being stupid and rather unimpressive, but my good friends know that they are invited in interrupt me with conjecture as well as to take my story off on a wholly different tangent.  Often by the time we have exhausted any particular theme at least 10 different versions of the story have been told, and we have more then likely been laughing so hard that we narrowly escaped wetting ourselves.  When you can almost pee your pants in front of someone,  THAT is love.

 

I think it’s fairly obvious that if someone has fulfilled these first two requirements for you (they listen to all your sobbing, and still want to entertain you), then they must care for you a great deal.  At this point reciprocation is certainly a viable option, as loving someone who already loves you is usually an easy choice.  The fact is, that if you are already putting that person in situations where you trust them with your sadness, and you, to some extent, rely on them for happiness, then you probably already love them but have simply never articulated it.  Remember though, we are examining both familial and romantic love, and either is viable at this point. 

 

These first two concepts are fairly obvious, and I have only mentioned them because I feel that they are vital parts of both identification of love targets as well as demonstration of active love.  My theories run much deeper, but for the purposes of this essay I will keep things fairly simplistic.  To that end I have only a few more thoughts on love, which don’t fit so neatly into a prescribed outline but rather fall from my brain in a loosely cobbled mass of proverbs.

 

Love those people who forgive you.  Forgiveness is hard to come by, and true forgiveness is an invaluable gem found only in the hearts of those who truly love you.  Inversely, forgive those you love of any transgression.  Forgive them, but do not foolishly forget that they have hurt you.  Sometimes lovers err, but sometimes these mistakes are signs that your love is unrequited.  Don’t waste your heart on those who would not share theirs with you.  It cheapens the value of your love, and it denies someone more deserving of your care.  While love may not be strictly finite, it doesn’t grow exponentially, and as nearly as I can tell, the only way to increase one’s capacity and surplus of love is to share it with those who would exchange the like in return.  Finally, love children, in the familial sense.  They are not only the ones who need love the most, they are also often the best at reciprocating love and at increasing one’s own potential for love.  Children are by far one of the greatest untapped resources when it comes to this, and far too many of them go without the reassurance, wonderful imaginations, forgiveness, and silliness that are inherent with a family of friends who truly love them.

 

In closing, whether you choose to love or hate in any given situation, do so responsibly.  Honor and honesty should be your luminaries.  While I do feel that both of these emotions are vital, I also feel that they are also both poisonous if kept out of the daylight for too long.  Say what you think.  Do what you want.  Only once you have opened your mind and let out the issues that consume you, can you have the clarity to do anything about them.  I also sincerely believe that once more people embrace such a philosophy, the hate in the world will be greatly deflated, as most of it is based on misinformation and emotional confusion.  Life is both too short and too long to spend it’s entirety in a state of confused hatred.  Even the shortest life should know love.

 

 

 

 

Post Text:

 

Anyone still wondering about Layla probably thinks that I am insane.  They are probably right.  Layla however is simply the fluid accumulation of qualities I love and have loved in women.  I know that her mercurial personality probably doesn’t exist in reality, and that in and of itself probably begins to define me a schizophrenic, but the truly insane aspect of it is that even my imaginary girlfriend decides to kick my ass every now and then, and I don’t mind.

 

Possibly the one redeeming factor of this whole imaginary sidebar, is that I was joking about her being jealous of real girls.  In all seriousness, Layla is simply the nickname given to my metaphorical blueprint of what I look for in a girl, and therefore she evanesces whenever I meet her match.