Hate, Revenge, and Forgiveness

I am on vacation and the next couple of days are occupied with travel, or I anticipate we will be places with no internet access. In the meantime, I have pulled up a post from last year See you in a few days.

I am reading Team of Rivals by Doris Kerns Goodwin, the story of Lincoln. It spans the days from the days from his tenure as a self-taught, backwoods attorney up through his presidency and assassination. I am still in the pre-presidency period and Goodwin makes an interesting observation. She talks about how, when faced with the good of the country, Lincoln had the “…singular ability to transcend personal vendetta, humiliation, or bitterness.”

Today there was a message tile (I’m not sure what they really call them, but message tile sounds good) on Facebook that I reposted to my wall. It goes something like this:

Write the name of somebody you hate on your body everyday in permanent marker, so no matter how you die they’ll become a suspect.

Within a few minutes of reposting it I received a handful of likes and comments. This must be a universal feeling with a lot of folks, some I even would have not imagined.

It is also troubling. By reposting that message, I was publicly admitting that there are folks out there I hate, and that is a strong word.  

The good news is that I can only think of three people that fall into the category, and their names come to mind right away. One of them has since died. The other two are still around, as far as I know.

There are other people that should have made the list, but I decided, either immediately or over time, that hate was too strong an emotion to feel for them. Most of the people on list of folks-I-decided-not-to-hate, I do not even think about much.  There are a few that I have even forgiven , and some I talk to on a regular basis.

Hey, life goes on and it has to be a really good grudge to keep nurturing it.

Of course, with hate comes revenge, and those things have gone through my mind, too.

I have discovered some things over the years in contemplating these hate relationships, though. I have had a while to think about it, because one of these people earned a place on my hate list when I was twenty-two. That was thirty-five years ago. Here are my rules about hate and revenge.

1. It takes great deal of energy to hate someone. It is taxing.
2. In each one of these instances, I was culpable to some extent, if for no other reason than because I put myself in the position I did, or chose to remain there long after I knew what the outcome was going to be.
3. Revenge is a wasted emotion. As a friend of mine often observes, it is tantamount to taking poison and waiting for the other people to die.
4. Most of the people I considered seeking revenge upon, I eventually forgot about. They ended up creating their own hell, and it was often far worse than anything I could have imagined.
5. Finally—and this is a big one—the best revenge is forgiveness.  

Something I have to work on.

See ya’ later.

WhatIfYouCouldNotFail.com by Tim Sunderland is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Comments

[Tlloydreilly]

Great post and topic. I have come to a point where I find it particularly difficult to hate. As you say, it is a most exhausting emotion that drains and depletes what humor I find in life. There is so much of it in the world today, however, that it is difficult to avoid this most tiring of emotions. A friend of mine once told me that hate was a "deliciously distasteful" activity that offers vast amounts of areas for writing muse. His soapbox came from the ease with which revenge stories seem to write themselves. He touted "The Count of Monte Cristo" as the benchmark for literary hate. I reminded him that it was love that ultimately won in that story, but he brushed me off by telling me that revenge is the best of all possible activities. Personally my guiding principle comes from Confucius..."Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves."