If you’ve come here to be taught something today, then you’ve come to the wrong place. But hopefully, you will learn something through it. This is the very first personal blog post and don’t kid yourselves, I’m certainly not looking to get your attention. I much prefer keeping my private life, well, private so the very idea of talking about myself seems rather odd to me. Unfortunately, I have a conflict of ways. As much as I like a private “private life”, I also like to help others. And very often, this impulse to help supersedes any other creature comforts, such as privacy. At least for this first time, I won’t give myself away too easily. Baby steps will make me more comfortable to share increasingly precise details. 

I want to share you something about love. Not the kind of categorised love involving necessarily a couple or whatnot, but the general love. You could define it as the liking of another or others, the appreciation of a person in your environment or the willingness to occupy the same space as them. Love can be experienced through friendships, cooperative endeavours or even a simple glance at a total stranger you seem to instantly connect with. This is the kind of love I want you to envision for today. 

Now let’s get personal. In the past, I’ve often found myself not liking someone. Ever feel that? That feeling you experience when you kind of dislike someone. Ever hate someone? I have. It’s quite a funny phenomenon to experience quite frankly. Its as if we are at war with another. Feels the same as war. We tend to criticise just as two countries at war. We behave in manners that resemble war. There are great ways to justify not liking someone. They may have offended you, they may have hurt you, they may have committed a crime against you. I have once in my lifetime hated someone because they had hurt me. I spent years ignoring their existence, not wanting to see them nor talk them ever again. I did have a good “reason” and it served me well for a while. One day, this person popped up out of nowhere like a groundhog sticks its nose out of its hole. This person had changed and luckily for the better. Courteous and professional, friendly and patient. And it hit me like a freight train falling from the sky. I had spent years disliking a good person. I had wasted away years of my “mental energy” on disliking a good individual. 

As hard as it me, it also changed my viewpoint and made my life as sweet as Skittles. Believe or not, we are all basically good. At the very core of our souls we are pure and honest goodness. On the flip side, we are all subject to the impossible demands of society, to the pressures of surviving and to the general struggles of living on this planet. The criminal has wildly succumbed to these irritants. The dishonest are slowly being squashed by these pressures. The honest manage to get by despite them. But at the very core, all of these people are good. I know others have hurt you. I know you’ve been cheated on, verbally abused or otherwise hurt. I have too. But it has ceased to have any effect on me. Because I have chosen to love them despite any invitation or reason to hate them. I’m not saying you should sacrifice your safety. If any abuse or harm is taking place, you should bail that area as quickly as possible. If someone is verbally getting you down, you should probably not have any more exchanges with him or her. But if you can continue to simply understand and love this person, if you can find an ounce of strength to do so, you will be very much better off. There is no sanity to be found in hatred. 

Living teaches you some valuable lessons. I have not particularly maintained a friendship with this person I had once disliked, but I am quite proud of the progress they have made. I simply wanted to share this personal experience with you. It is very dear to my heart and I hope it will be very dear to yours.

Alessandro Macchione 

A & R at Father & Son Records

© Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters