Letting go of hate by questioning the very idea of evil
Some of the most contented people I know are really good at forgiveness. They do not hold grudges. They have the ability to look at the person who has harmed them and see beyond that particular action, insult or slight – even the most grievous.
As part of my own spiritual inquiry, I've been thinking a lot about this idea, which led me to a book by Simran Jeet Singh, called The Light We Give: How Sikh Wisdom Can Transform Your Life. In it, Singh writes about what it was like growing up as a turban-wearing brown kid in Texas in the 1980s. He learned how to deflect ridicule and insults with humor, but when he got older he could no longer laugh off racist epithets.
Instead, he learned how to confront the people throwing hate his way.
He told me the story of an exchange he had some years ago while he was out for a run near the NYU campus in New York, where he was teaching:
"As I'm running I hear someone shouting at me, 'f–ing Osama, f–ing Osama.' I could have ignored it and just felt irritated. But as I'm running by, I look at this person and he's probably 18 or 20 years old, the same age as my students. So I
