A hungry tiger once stumbled upon a lamb drinking from a stream. The tiger said to the lamb, “How dare you muddy my water!”
But the lamb replied, “Please sir, I am drinking downstream from you. How could I be muddying your water?” And the tiger growled.
The tiger then said, “Well, you were the one who was calling me names last year at this time.”
The lamb replied, “I’m sorry sir, but I was just born 6 months ago, so it couldn’t have been me doing so last year.” And the tiger growled.
“Well, if it wasn’t you, then it must have been your father!” And the tiger pounced on the lamb and ate him.
– Aesop
When we feel hatred toward someone – when we are extremely angry with, or even just dislike another person or group of people, we will find any reason in the world to continue to live in the hate, anger, and distaste for them. There comes a point where it seems like there is not much a person can say or do in the eyes of the one who starves with the hunger of hatred – but there always seems to be something that can be done by the person who feels the pangs of hatred.
What if today we all looked closely at the anger we feel inside? What if today we saw that anger differently? Just as we move through fog (fog has a beginning, middle, and end), so too, do we seem to pass through anger; and if we allow ourselves, we can move through hatred as well.
Maybe the anger has nothing to do with the proverbial lamb in our lives. Maybe the anger is in fact physiological, and out of desperation we need to find an object to project our anger onto – an “object” that unfortunately is not an object at all, but another human being. Like the lamb for the tiger, having an object provides us with a target for our anger.
A reason we seem to need to find an object onto which we can project our anger is that in an object, we have a tangible substance with a physical size (something emotional pain alone does not have). Without a physical size, things like hate and anger can grow beyond shape and form and overwhelm even the spirit of who we are.
Anger and hatred hurt others and can even devour them – there’s no doubt of that; but what anger and hatred do to our Selves is self-consuming.
Consider the nature of your hunger before you decide to satisfy your “self” with the next meal of hatred and anger. The target of your anger might just be what’s going on inside of you, and not in that lamb downstream after all….