Back to the idea of not focusing on what you hate that I posted about a couple of days ago: Here we are at treacherousness part II, “Hating something requires less energy, focus and effort than the complex discovery process of finding what we love.”
Hating something results from narrowing the focus down to the specific object of hate, a winnowing process based on experience and perception that is fairly easy. As I mentioned in the last post, we usually learn to hate something by having intimate experiences with it – I’ve held call center jobs, and been bitten by spiders, and I hate both pretty much equally. I can describe this hatred in detail, and at length. I can recount every little detail of what makes me hate them. It’s easy, because I’ve been there.
Loving something can be about experience too, of course; I know I love dancing because I’ve spent many a club night dancing my ass off. Yet, no one really wants to hear about it, and more importantly, “I love dancing!” is a lot more open-ended a statement than “I hate call-center jobs!” Loving something opens you up to endless possibilities (“well, if I love dancing, maybe I should take lessons!”) rather than hating on it, which narrows down to only one option, which is avoidance (“I hate spiders, so I will avoid them at all costs!”).
Deciding that I love something, though, requires me to expand my horizons. But that is scary. I’ll stand right up and admit that: it is frightening to look beyond the comfortable and easy “known” to explore different ideas, habits and lifestyles. The fact is that it’s just so easy to bitch about things. It’s fun. We all get together at the local pub and gripe about our jobs, and the fight we had with our SO, and spiders (or maybe that’s just me). Talking about what we love though, always turns into a serious discussion, an analysis, because loving something is never enough in our society; we have to justify it.
Which means spending time doing what we love (scary) and thinking about why we love it (scarier) and hey, let’s get a beer and I’ll tell you old funny stories about call center jobs I have loathed…
Yeah, easier. But treacherous, and damaging in the long run.
Knowing that you love something requires a certain level of confidence that isn’t needed to hate something; mostly, it requires self-knowledge. And that’s what makes it scary, I think. I’m afraid of what I don’t know about myself, sometimes. Which is really the best reason to spend time finding out what I really love, because otherwise I’m just clouding up my personality with things I hate because it feels safer to build up that wall rather than tear it down.
But it isn’t safer, it is a trap. Eventually we wall ourselves in by hate, feeling trapped and angry and full of self-directed hatred. Knowing what you hate is important, definitely; but living by those restrictions is tantamount to burying yourself alive.
