On Forgiveness

Lets talk, for a moment, about forgiveness. I posted (as my status today) the following few sentences:

Forgiveness, strange as it may sound, is not something we do for other people - it is not the forgetting or condoning of a past action. It is something we do for ourselves - it is the freedom of the spirit that results from refusing to continue to hurt over a past injury.

Forgiveness, for me, is an evolving concept; I am sometimes better and sometimes worse, I sometimes remember and I sometimes forget. Usually, it takes coming to a place where I am incredibly uncomfortable before I am truly able to let go.

As I understand it today, forgiveness must start with self. We must accept our humanity - accept our hurt - before we can even begin to forgive the other person.

An example then.

For the past few days, I have been in quite a considerable amount of upset about a business contact failing to get back to me regarding an issue that directly affects my housing situation. First, I have to accept that I am upset - this is different than the realization of upset (clearly, I am aware that I am unhappy) in that it requires the willingness to be upset, rather than change anything. For the most part, being upset is uncomfortable, and I would rather escape the emotion than truly experience it. When I am able to accept being upset, I can sit with it for a moment and see what it is that has me be this way in a way that is different from blame. Blame is counter productive - it is a defense mechanism rather than a path to emotional healing. When I am blaming, my mental conversations sound something like, "Okay, why are you upset?" "Because she didn't get back to me!" When I am looking at what truly has me bothered, things sound more like this: "Why are you upset?" "Not having this information threatens my sense of security. I'm scared."

It's okay to be scared. Knowing what I'm afraid of is the first place that I can begin with forgiveness of myself. Can I be okay with being afraid? Can I accept that I am not perfect? That I don't have all of the answers? That, every once in a while, I am going to feel like a three year old, without the luxury of a temper tantrum? This is the first place I can start. Yes - I can, moment by moment, forgive myself for being a human.

In my ability to forgive myself, I find that the upset and the hurt that I was accepting and forgiving (paradoxically) seem to melt away. I also (almost counter-intuitively) find the ability to (moment by moment) forgive the previously 'offending' party.

This forgiveness, as I mentioned early on, is distinctly different than forgetting or condoning the actions taken by the party. It is nothing more, and nothing less, than freeing yourself from the pain of your own humanity.

For Griff, In Memoriam

W mentioned, the other day, that the store he works in had received in its shipment a hatchling Savannah Monitor - a creature that I have felt connected to since I was a child. I, of course, insisted on stopping by and paying the little darling a visit; as it curled its tiny tail around my thumb and gripped against my nail with its claws, the pebbly scales and flicking black tongue brought back a whirlwind of memories.

...

When I was ten, my parents bought me a little lizard for my birthday; I'd been keeping reptiles for a few years by that point - a gecko here, a tree frog there - and what I had wanted more than anything that year appeared in my bedroom that night with a bow on the corner of the four foot tank. A brown little scaly thing - no more than six inches long from the tip of its nose to the tip of its tail, as puffy and hissy and cantankerous as only a baby Savannah can be. Gryphon, or Griff, as I would come to call it, if he had survived, would have quickly become a four-foot phenomenon full of teeth and claws and the permanent scowl characteristic of most 'intelligent' lizards; as fate would have it, he passed away of unknown causes less than a year after I'd got him, leaving me to look back years later and admire (incredulously) my parents faith in me to have placed such a challenging creature under my charge. Thirteen years and a career in herpetology later, I can finally see what they knew all along.


Photo courtesy of: http://musicalpeace.org/vyoma/Photos/FIRS/savannah_monitor_02_092802.jpg