#whatdoyouhate

[chadwyks-magic-spot-blog]

What is something you hate? I’m not talking a pet peeve, I’m talking like when a certain food is an ingredient and you won’t even eat it. Or when a certain actor is in a film and won’t even see it. Yet everyone else LOVES IT!! Sadly, for me the list is very long, but what do you hate? #MamaMillennial #MamaMillennialsQuestionOfTheDay #WhatDoYouHate https://www.instagram.com/p/BnwD5K5jnOd/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=1q75sl55gmu46

[walkawhile]

People who hate running

I seem to have a lot of friends who “hate running.”

Actually, I hear that a lot from coworkers, friends, random strangers. Very few people seem to actually like running. At best, they find it tolerable. At worst, people make it sound like a step up from being drawn on the rack.

I wonder. Do my friends actually hate running, or what running makes them feel?

That shortness of breath. Chest pains. A gasping feeling. Like they can’t...breathe.

Or maybe it’s the feeling of muscles burning. The faint, maybe unconscious thought that the things holding you up may abandon you and drop you to the ground, where you’ll lay gasping for breath with your legs burning and face red with embarrassment or exertion or anger.

I would understand better if those physical feelings were what my friends really hate.

Personally, I prefer to reserve the word “hate” only for special occasions. (Of course, I’m a guy with a minor obsession with the right words who just retitled this blog Precision x Passion.) 

Actually, hating -- the feeling and even the labeling of hate -- doesn’t come easily to me. I have to think hard to list the things I genuinely hate. Is that unusual?

It’s hard to hate when everything that happens looks like something that helps me get better at life.

There was a kid who slapped me in Spanish class in middle school, possibly for saying silly things. But I just think it taught me something about people who hold power and played a part in my wanting to know how to fight.

Even the man who spat in my face a few years ago. He was livid after narrowly avoiding a car crash (that would’ve been my fault) and basically yelled and threatened me for a few minutes while I tried to apologize. 

I’ve thought about this situation more than a few times since then, like the way you think about any massively emotionally charged situation. I felt anger, sure, and frustration and a dangerous desire to break and hurt things, but never hate. 

I think that’s because no matter how I look at it, I understand that he was scared and acting out and I couldn’t really blame him. I do hold him accountable for crossing a line and spitting -- but hatred or any of the actions that go along with it just aren’t an appropriate reaction...unlike my dark fantasies where I step out of the car with a bat and leave him mangled on the ground as I drive away, vengeance having been served. Where I’d then rightfully head to jail for something like assault with a deadly weapon and wrongful use of force.

It seems difficult to hate things or people for just being the way they are. As quipped in a great Buddhist lecture, “Getting mad at someone for something they say or do is like getting mad with fire for being hot, or getting angry at a rock for being solid, or being cross with the sky for being blue.” I never quite understood though, that while the nature of fire is always to burn, what does it mean that humans can change the way they are by changing their perception? 

I think it becomes hard to hate when you take responsibility for the things that happen in your life. Not that you passively accept everything that comes your way, but that you do what’s in your power and let go of the things that truly aren’t. 

As an aside, I’m sure this is one of those thoughts that leads to my friends thinking that sometimes I don’t play with a full deck. “Rob doesn’t feel emotions” is the refrain, I believe. Love it.

Could it be that the capacity for love is proportional to the capacity to empathize, to choose to connect and understand instead of jumping to conclusions and closing down? 

And if I’m so unfamiliar with the feeling of hate, does that keep me from feeling its opposite? That because I don’t feel the sharp depths of hatred, I’ll have a hard time feeling the heights of corresponding love? That’s a sobering thought. More so because I’m actually not sure I know what love feels like.

Lust, definitely. Attachment, yes. Fondness, yeah. Appreciation, aye. Satisfaction, check. Compassion, I think. 

So what does love feel like?

I sense that I’m fast entering territory debated across the ages by poets, philosophers, kings and commoners. I will hold that thought for another time.

Back to running. 

I don’t hate running. I don’t fear the shortness of breath or the burning muscles or the sweat or discomfort that goes with it. It’s uncomfortable, and that tells me that I’m growing, which is one of the feelings I love the most.

I actually wanted to go for a run today, as it got dark. There’s something peaceful about running in darkness. But because I was busy, I didn’t. 

Maybe some people actually just hate the act of running.