You have an automobile accident and a serious injury. After years of being single someone comes into your life and now you don't know what to do. You lose your job. Your spouse informs you that your marriage is over. There are any number of surprising bumps and unanticipated forks in the road of life.
Decisions have to be made.
You can try to take the safe road but often that means ending up on a path to nowhere. Jesus does not have in mind some sort of morbid self-hatred. What he is saying is that when we hold onto life too tightly, we build walls around ourselves for protection. When we try to keep things in life from changing, we just sort of calcify and collapse in upon ourselves. To follow Jesus' way is togive up the safety of the comfortable and the familiar for the daring road of new discoveries, new adventures, new life, abundant life.