Posted on:Sep 04 2020
So I asked a friend of mine what topic should follow my blog on Kindness and he said Forgiveness.
And I said, whoa, okay.
Talk about a pot-stirrer !
Who doesn’t have a person in their life they have forgiven, or are working on forgiving, or should forgive?
There’s a chapter in Gordon Livingston’s TSO, TLS titled, “Forgiveness is a form of letting go but they are not the same thing.” I’m not yet sure where this blog is headed, but I do know I’ll invoke Gordon throughout.
For sure, how a voice resonates is a personal thing. For me, Gordon’s non-preachy, non-judgey way with words never fails to illuminate where I stand in the world, always opens the door to being more aware of how I’m doing my life. At the same time he warns us there is so little we control, he reminds us that we are never stripped of all our choices. He’s like the wise parent who gives us a shove...gently...go on now, it’ll be okay.
Why is it we get so hung up on forgiveness? Why is it so hard to surrender the past, to let go of something that happened to us, be it twenty years ago or even twenty minutes ago?
Memory has something to do with it.
Starting in childhood, we collect memories, good and bad - they’re what “give us a sense of continuity and link the many people we have been to the one that temporarily inhabits our changing body.” These former selves, complete with a collection of habits and conditioned responses, are like an anchor - it’s good to have the stability...until it’s not...because sometimes this anchor inhibits adapting to new circumstances. Inhibiting change is inherently pessimistic.
Of course we need to pay attention to the history of our lives. In the right way and the right amount. “Somewhere between ignoring the past and wallowing in it there is a place where we can learn from what has happened to us, including the inevitable mistakes we have made, and integrate this knowledge into our plans for the future.” Striving to find this place is an inherently optimistic process because it embraces change.
It’s also a process that inevitably requires exercises in forgiveness--that is, giving up some grievance to which we are entitled. These exercises are not about forgetting or reconciling, and they’re not something we do for others. Exercises in forgiveness pretty much all boil down to choosing to let go. It is a gift to ourselves.
“To acknowledge that we’ve been harmed by another person but choose to let go of our resentment or wish for retribution requires a high order of emotional and ethical maturity.” Maybe it’s helpful to think about forgiveness as liberating yourself from a sense of oppression, as deciding you do not want to become the person weighed down by all that sticky, heavy, insidious shit. Perhaps a minute or two contemplating that person will provide determination?
By pruning those preoccupations and pseudo-explanations that are rooted in the past, we free ourselves to choose the attitude we bring to the present and future. “Exercising this kind of consciousness and determination is a certain antidote to the feelings of helplessness and anxiety that underlie most of our unhappiness.”
Yes, it’s easier if every misfortune can be blamed on someone else, easier to not look too closely at how we contributed, easier to just chalk it up to Life Is Full Of Adversity. But when we place responsibility outside ourselves, "we miss out on the healing knowledge that what happens to us is not nearly as important as the attitude we adopt in response."
In short, blame distracts us from asking the question, “What do we need to do now to improve our lives?”
For many people, our memory of the past is like an endlessly entertaining, distracting, often painful movie full of all the explanations and misery and drama that went into making us what we are today. Hard to say how much of this looping is a work of our imagination ! Either way, it can preoccupy our attention. And to what end? We can’t now change the parts we wish were different, the unfairness, the injuries.
Letting go is both the simplest and most difficult of all human endeavors.
Letting go is simultaneously an act of will and of surrender.
And it’s crazy but true - letting go seems impossible right up until the moment you do it.
So.
Here we are.
What’s next?
It’s coming on fall now and, partly thanks to my friend’s suggestion, I have new-found appreciation for the inherent optimism of my pruning shears! Now to find that diamond hand file...
P.S. Pot-stirring topic indeed. Over the week of writing this, a few Past Selves visited...LSS, Current Self struggled before determining that, really, they came back for another hug.
