The Weight Of Envy—A Short Story About Letting Go

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Excerpt: A teacher told his students to make a list of everybody they envied. But, instead of using paper, to write each name on a potato…

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The Story:

Once a teacher told his students: “Go home and write down the names of the people you envy. But do not use paper for this. Write each name down on a separate potato, and bring me your potatoes tomorrow, so we can discuss them.”

The students were eager to complete the assignment. Some brought only two or three potatoes, others dragged in a heavy sack. But the teacher didn’t address the topic that day, only told the students to bring the potatoes to the next lecture.

This happened over and over, and every day, the students carried their potatoes with them. The potatoes started rotting, and their weight became an annoyance.

The students initially hoped to air all their grievances about their enemies: this person doesn’t deserve his marriage, that person didn’t earn her wealth. But as the stench of rotting followed them to class, they became thoroughly sick of the assignment.

At last, the teacher looked at them and said, “This situation is very similar to what you carry in your heart when you don’t like some people. This hatred makes your heart unhealthy and you carry that hatred in your heart everywhere you go. If you can’t bear the smell of spoiled potatoes for a week, imagine the impact on your heart of this hatred that you carry throughout your life. The more people you envy, the heavier your soul is. And for what? Nothing changes, you’re just making it harder for yourself to enjoy life.”

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The Moral:

Heaviness comes from clinging.

Lightness comes from letting go.

When you white-knuckle emotions like envy, jealousy, hatred—of course they stay with you. You’re dragging them along with tightly clenched fists. It should be of no surprise that every time you turn around, there they are.

The first step towards lightness is to loosen your grip and drop the weight of what you’ve been working so hard to carry.

Easier said than done, of course.

Dropping something physical is as easy as opening your hand. Dropping something mental isn’t quite as simple—but the idea is the same.

When we physically hold onto something, we are creating a tight wall around that object. In the case of the above story—our potato sack. When we loosen our grip, we remove that tight wall and free our hands so they can be used in other ways.

The same is true for dropping things mentally.

We need to remove the tight wall that we created around that fixed object of our attention and move our mind elsewhere.

If envy is what our mind is gripped to, we need to remove our focus from those people whom we envy. We need to unfollow, unfriend, block, mute, remove, and/or disconnect from the source of that envy in every way we can.

And we need to simultaneously surround ourselves with people who evoke the opposite type of response from us.

What we need aren’t more reasons to carry around potatoes.

What we need are more strategies that will allow us travel through life with a lighter load.

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