Feargiveness

Someone recently asked about forgiveness.  After thinking about it for a little while the best definition that I can form is that forgiveness is love, when love isn't so easy to give.

Forgive and forget are two great strategies, but unfortunately since we are intelligent, thinking beings the forgetting part seems more impossible than natural.  When I think about times in my life when I have had to learn to forget, I can still begin to fidget a bit when I think about the hurts that I endured.  There's nothing wrong with this.  Hurt is hurt.  If you ignore it it's just going to hide and come get you in the night.  Hurt. And then become one with the feeling.  Then do it again when it comes up again.  And again when you have to.

Very few people make a conscious choice that sounds something like this, "I think I'm going to be really selfish and hurt Laura today.  No wait, perhaps I'll continue to hurt her for a long time..."  People do things without thought or intent, far more often than we realize.  What we must realize is that these people are love and are not diabolical strategists bent on ruining our lives.  Some of them, anyway.  Our feelings and reactions are the responsibilities of no one, but ourselves.

The greatest trick to forgiving is learning to forgive yourself.  When we are comfortable being one with our hurt or our guilt, we can move on (for the time being).  Realizing that we are only responsible for our own actions and reactions, and not those of anyone else, is the key to our freedom.  Sure, I can dwell on what an ex-husband did to me and I can hold a grudge because of failed promises that came up empty and I can be sore because I did keep my end of the bargain.  But those were MY choices to stay there, to take what he gave and to be bitter about it.

Tonight I was thinking about how wonderful it must be to be able to be whatever you are, and know that love will always be there for you.  During my marriage there were times when my husband was unbearable and I endured those, waiting for the better times to re-emerge.  I always honored him for the good that he was, in spite of what he wasn't.  I took the good with the bad, but for a long time I was angry at myself for doing that.  You know, when I excise all of the assignations of blame and responsibility from the situation, I am left with knowing that I loved well a lot of the time, and a clear knowledge of something to want for myself going forward.

Forgiveness definitely comes in stages and when we allow ourselves to honor the good and are not compelled to qualify the bad, we are a whole lot closer to freedom.  The important thing in all of this, I believe, is wanting to forgive, or wanting to remember the love that we have for someone- even when they don't make it easy for us.  When the storm finally subsides we are often left with a new arrangement which sometimes means there will be a different relationship, but as long as we honor the good in ourselves and our others, there is light with us, even in the darkness, and this is nothing to fear.