Fighting hate with hate only fuels more hate

This caught my eye today...

"Hatred does not cease through hatred at any time. Hatred ceases through love."

It's a quote from Buddha that makes me think about negativity.

There are countless times where something makes us so angry that it seems the only way we can react to it, and the easiest way to react to it, is to lash out back with just as hateful a thought or word as was thrown at us.

But let's stop for a minute and think about it. When I react to hate with more hate, what have I accomplished? Have I put out the fire and resolved the issue at hand?

Absolutely not.

More times than not, all I'll have ended up doing was feeding the fire, the fire of hate, making it larger, full of even more bad potential.

It's kind of like that saying - "two wrongs don't make a right." Just because someone hates me or hates something I do, is the situation then alleviated by my return of that hate? Nope. It just keeps that wheel turning.

I thought of a recent statement that a friend who's going through a very painful divorce said regarding the situation - "It's very sad when people become consumed by revenge." In this particular case, one person was so upset, and so hateful about the split, that they have become all-consumed by their need for revenge and their need to create as much hurt as they can.

They do so because THEY are hurt. But it certainly has not helped the process, nor the hurt inside of them. My friend understood this, and has been doing their best not to react the same way...not to meet that revenge with more anger, but with an understanding of the pain the other party is going through.

What Buddha tells us to do is to stop for a moment before we react in anger, before we return the hate, and calmly ask ourselves what the right thing to do in the situation is.

If we love, if we forgive, if we show compassion, instead of returning hate with hate, only then can we start to douse the fires of hate that come into our lives.