In this episode of Timeless Tales, which is the first episode of the series, we will explore
the dangers of hating the things that we can’t have.
And in the first tale of the series, we will follow a proud and hungry fox who can’t
get the grapes he so desperately needs to survive.
For a long time, The Fox had failed to find any food, and if he continued to hunger for
any longer, he would surely pass away.
So he was pleasantly surprised when, in an instant, he came upon a juicy bunch of grapes,
hanging from a vine that had climbed high atop the branch of a tree.
The Fox jumped for the grapes, but he could not jump high enough to reach them.
Then he tried to climb the tree, but his body was not meant for climbing.
Then he tried to shake the tree, but it was too big and strong for him to move it at all.
And now came an important moment in The Fox’s life, a moment which all animals must face
at one point or another: the moment where one must realize their own inadequacy and
failure, allowing them to grow stronger in the future.
But future growth sometimes comes at the cost of present embarrassment, and The Fox was
not willing to be embarrassed.
Rather than acknowledge his own inadequacy, he would rather maintain his pride and project
the inadequacy outwards, towards the world.
It was not him who was inadequate, he was perfect.
It was those grapes.
“Those grapes are sour anyways,” he said to himself.
“I don’t even want them.
They are beneath me.”
He found it much easier to hate the grapes rather than to live with the pain and embarrassment
of wanting them and not being able to have them.
But hate is a very slippery slope.
The next day, The Fox saw a bunch of chipmunks eating those very same grapes he could not
reach.
For a reason unclear to him, this upset The Fox.
They must not know about the grapes, he thought.
“Don’t you know,” said the Fox to the chipmunks, “those grapes are rotten and
sour!
They are beneath animals like us.”
He hoped to win some allies in his mental fight against the grapes, such is the case
with all who hate.
They want others to hate with them, because it makes them feel more justified in their
hatred.
“They taste quite sweet to us,” said the chipmunks.
“Would you like us to toss some down to you?”
The Fox seethed inside.
The chipmunks were beginning to make him feel like double the fool he felt yesterday: once
for being inadequate in reaching them, and twice for convincing himself they were falsely
sour.
But The Fox would not be made to feel like a fool!
So he stepped deeper into hate and delusion.
“Alas, I thought you were fine specimen like me,” he said, “But now I see the
truth.
You two are much lesser and filthier than me, just like those grapes!
Not only would I never eat sour grapes, but I would never work with immoral, privileged,
low-down, no good chipmunks like you!
The thought simply sickens me.
I would eat you two right now if I could.
I’d be doing the world a favour.”
The Fox proudly walked away, feeling much superior to the chipmunks, who spent the rest
of their day passing out grapes to the other animal who came by and could not reach them.
Oh how rotten this world is, thought The Fox.
Full of sour grapes and immoral chipmunks.
I can hardly bare it.
The Fox went to sleep, but since he had not eaten for a very long time, he did not wake
up.
When we can’t have what we want, there is always a reason.
Maybe, we’re not meant to get what we want, or maybe, we’re not the person we need to
be yet to get that thing.
But when we are too proud to admit our own weaknesses, faults, and inadequacies, we start
to hate the thing we wanted instead, and this hate makes us delusional.
We end up blocking ourselves from the truth that would allow us to have that thing.
Rather than learning the truth of how to get that thing, we end up deluding ourselves with
lies as to why it’s no longer worth getting.
We end up creating a delusion to maintain our perfect self-image and explain the imperfections
of the world around us.
If The Fox simply admitted his own inadequacies, he could have gotten help from the chipmunks
the very next day.
He could have grown and learned how to achieve something he could not have previously acquired.
He could have eaten the grapes and survived.
But being too proud, he began to hate the grapes and the chipmunks instead.
He deluded himself into thinking that the grapes were sour and the chipmunks immoral,
and by deluding himself, he blocked himself from the solution to his own problem.
And how often do we, like The Fox, claim the grapes that we can’t reach are sour.
When a guy gets rejected by a girl at the bar, he might say he never thought she was
attractive anyways.
When we someone achieve the success we want, we might assume they were overly-privileged
or immoral, and then we tell ourselves that we wouldn’t want that kind of success anyways.
When a more beautiful person walks in the room, we might assume that they are probably
more shallow or less smart than us, and we tell ourselves we would rather be smart than
beautiful.
But it’s dangerous to assume the grapes we can’t reach are sour and hate things
because we can’t have them, because that leads to more hate, delusion, and eventually,
ruin.