Forgiveness Is to Let Go of the Past and Proceed to the Future

Forgiveness is to let go of the past and proceed to the future.

Forgiving doesn't mean forgetting, and it doesn't necessarily mean ever trusting the other person again. (You can forgive somebody and still never let them inside your boundaries ever again.) It does mean that you will no longer be renting them space in your brain for free, and it does usually mean you'll find it easier to move on to a place where you're no longer suffering over something that's over, done, and unchangeable.

Forgiveness means it finally becomes unimportant that you hit back. You're done. It doesn't necessarily mean that you want to have lunch with the person. If you keep hitting back, you stay trapped in the nightmare..."

I see forgiveness as primarily one-sided. I seldom think about the public or transactional pa I see forgiveness as primarily one-sided. I seldom think about the public or transactional part of it. I realize that exists, but the forgiver-side is what comes to mind when I think of the concept.

The steps I take are just to sit with the pain -- acknowledge it, accept it, act however I need to to honor it -- and then wait as long as it takes, while gently reminding myself of matters of existential-moral perspective:

* We all share ignorance and a capacity to make honest mistakes.

* We all share evil and a capacity to do cruel things for bad reasons.

* We all wind up dying alone having done only a fraction of the good we meant to.

* I'm a mammal with a nervous system that experiences pain. It takes time to release.

This sort of perspective-talk helps me contextualize pain, anger and sadness and be patient with it.

Forgiving someone without their knowledge absolutely changes how I feel. I feel less bad! It's slow though. I don't just "suddenly" forgive. To me it's like letting go of a fear or an ignorance, growing into a person no longer overwhelmed by the pain. I always remember how-to-feel it -- I always remember the originating events -- I have just quieted it in my mind to the point it no longer dominates any of my life. It's placed on a dusty shelf in the attic, not sitting on my chest while I'm trying to sleep.

It can be an ongoing process if I discover new dimensions to the way the original pain affected me. That can bring emotions back to the foreground and require some additional sitting-with-them. So I do that.

I think it's possible to forgive without saying "what was done was ok". It was bad. It was just bad-in-context. Bad-in-perspective. Bad in a world with lots of badness. And most of all: bad in the past, so no longer requiring quite so much of my