Jesse Sample

Have you noticed the circular nature of hate and fear in your life? It’s as though life delivers us into the arms of the things we fear most. It’s a reverse form of poetry how our repulsion for some things draws them closer to us. It’s almost like the universe plays an ironic trick. We can often see it when we take a Birds Eye view into the lives of others but we are often oblivious to see this pattern in our own lives. Maybe it’s because we’re in it too deep.

When I take the time to actively hate something in this world, it’s personal. I don’t like fish sauce or dumb government spending but I don’t make it about me. These things are gross and unethical, respectively, but I don’t feel personally offended. When I see something I hate, I have skin in that game and a dog in that fight. I own that thing on a deep level or it means something very deep to me.

And some of us run from these things our whole life and we scream to the stars, “I will never be that thing I hate!” or “I will never be that thing that I’m afraid of.” And its seems that if you listen close enough, the universe giggles a little bit and says, “Oh yeah?” If you hate rats, be careful, because sometimes it doesn’t matter if you spend your final few breaths screaming in agony while being eaten by them. The fear and the hate worked on you every day you possessed this fear. It stripped you of joy of and diminished the quality of your life. It might as well have been rats.

Here’s the good news. We are capable and change and are not damned to live out these nightmares. We just gotta see it. Maybe it’s not the universe playing the trick. Maybe it’s us.