On the topic of love and hate

I recently read the following in the feed of my good Twitter friend Dondi Scumaci:

When your hate for something drives you harder than your love for something, you have lost your way.

And I do not in any way disagree with Dondi - far from it, because there is great truth in this. But still, it made me think: actually, whenever I feel that my hate is driving me anywhere, it's time to stop and reconsider what's going on. And at this point, it is surely worth considering some other driver for my actions.
Normally, I am a great supporter of reframing problems, and many will probably think that this would be an obvious case where reframing is in place - for isn't it just that easy: let the hate for something be replaced by love for the absence of this something? An obvious example: no, I do not hate the noise - I love the silence. Or the sounds of birds that I can not hear for traffic noise. Or...
And that might all be very good - many times you will find that you are not really driven by hate, but by the love of an opposition. The above example is an excellent one of the kind - only few people hate the noise because it's noise, but rather because noise makes enjoyment of silence or tweeting birds impossible.
But be careful not to blindly let irrational hate be reframed as the love of the opposite. If, for example, I suffered from arachnophobia - I'm not at all certain that it would be constructive to replace my hate for spiders with a penchant for killing them. It might be better to look closer and understand what is the basis for my arachnophobia. And perhaps I would even realize that there are also good things about spiders that I can enjoy - and get ideas to arrange my daily life so they and I do not bother each other quite as much?
(Translated from Noget om kærlighed og had)

Silence without loneliness

At some point, I wrote a couple of posts about the choreographer Twyla Tharp and her book "The Creative Habit" - a book that I recently found from my heaps of books in search of the title of a headline.
The headline is about one of Tharp's exercises in the book: "Build up your tolerance for solitude" - to build an ability of tolerance towards being alone. You simply have to sit alone in a room and let your mind fly. Initially for one minute; later on you can expand to ten minutes after which you can begin to focus on whether an idea or goal is formed in your thoughts - otherwise you have to icrease the time used. The exercise is called "ciúnas gan uaigneas" - it is Gaelic for "silence without loneliness" - without loneliness, because the idea you breed will be your companion. As Tharp states, this is the exact opposite of meditation - you should not try to empty your mind, on the contrary, you should attempt to lure thoughts from the subconscious in order to befriend them and stay with them.
I have never really been able to understand the concept of meditation - so I was very happy when I found ciúnas gan uaigneas. I should set aside more time for this purpose...
(Translated from Stilhed uden ensomhed, originally published January 16, 2013)