Once upon a time, a schoolteacher asked her students in her class to bring an empty sack and some potatoes to school. When they arrived, she then asked each of them to write down on the potatoes the names of the people they hated. Some wrote three names, some wrote five and some wrote none at all. When they were done, they were asked to put each of these potatoes in the sack that they brought and the teacher instructed them to bring those sacks of potatoes whereever they went.
2 weeks later, some of the children complained that their sack of potatoes were heavy. Some of them complained that the potatoes had gone bad, and that they stank.
The teacher then went on to say, “Well children, the sacks of potatoes you carry reflect what its like to have hatred inside you. It’s a heavy burden as you might have experienced. You also saw that eventually, hatred eminates a putrid smell. So to those of you with many potatoes, you would have found that it’s really not in your best interest to harbour hatred. It weighs you down, and makes you impure.”
“If you did not hate anybody, you wouldn’t have that excess baggage as you went about your daily life. Such is the moral of the story.” The End.
***
Aww… how touching. But that isn’t the end. In the end, the students threw the rotten potatoes at the teacher and she went back home bruised black and blue and sued for battery the following day. So much for teaching those kids a lesson.
Anyway, I was writing this as a euphemism as a response to something a friend of mine wrote. She reminded me that I’ve got this uncanny ability to drop friendships at the drop of a hat. Wahey, ain’t that a skill. Can’t see why that’s physically, if not emotionally possible for anybody. But perhaps it’s just the coudn’t-care-less side of me. People come and go in your life anyway. And later, they go away… permanently. So nothing’s new in that eh? You’d be pretty silly to ignore that point lest denial made you oblivious to the obvious.
Lets not be naive, people. There are bad people in this world, people that we hate, and dislike. We could be carrying many of those potatoes around right now. My take is that some of those potatoes are rotten already. But I guess life goes on and we just bear the stench. We’re probably not bothered to discard all those potatoes and rather take them all with us right to our inevitable end.
But oops, according to someone, I do discard them. Pretty effectively too. So I’m here to declare that I have no rotten potatoes with me. If you were a name I wrote down on a potato once upon a time, I threw you in a bin right about then too.
And I never looked back.
