Sometimes you have conversations with others that in the moment are meant to be for the well being of the person you are talking to. After the conversation when you reflect upon it you find that the talk was really a mirror being held up for you to see the direction you need to go. I looked into that mirror this weekend.
This conversation happened in the wee hours of the morning after spending several hours on the golf course. I’ll leave the math to you and if you get it right you may be as amazed as I am that I can see in the mirror so clearly and hear the lesson so loud and clear.
We were talking about experiences we had gone through many, many years ago and how we came to peace with the trials that shaped us. I shared a snippet of a time in my life that I held onto anger about without going into great detail. My detail came more when I talked about forgiveness. I had replayed times in my life to someone else before and their reaction was similar as that of the person I was having this conversation with. In both cases the other person I was talking to related forgiveness to something they were holding on to that it seemed they couldn’t let go of either and said similar sediments of “I just don’ know how I could forgive” meaning forgiving someone from long ago in their time. In my first conversation I missed my opportunity but this time my learning moment was there. I heard myself saying, “It’s not about forgiving the other people. It was about me forgiving myself for being the person that went through that.”
Once I forgave myself for being that person I felt a calm come over. I explained further that just because I forgave, didn’t mean that I forgot. What I may not have said (remember the math equation earlier) was that because I forgave also didn’t mean that the actions of the other people was right. I wasn’t denying them their responsibility in the situation. I was simply allowing it to be that. Their responsibility. Their thing to come to peace with or to not come to peace, but not mine to hold onto. I wasn’t going to let the emotions tied to the time define who I was anymore. I held onto the emotion probably in an effort to be in control of something that wasn’t mine to control from the beginning. I was owning my part in it if I had a part to own and coming to terms with what that meant about me for those times in my life. But I wasn’t changing myself anymore to avoid being that again. I was letting some of the cracks of my safety wall be without rushing to fill them with anger immediately to avoid feeling.
Since that first conversation I had where I described the feeling I got from forgiving I have replayed that conversation and now this more recent one over again. While I had found forgiveness with those times in my life and it opened windows to let other emotions fly away there was other situations that I was still holding on to. And it was time that I dealt with them and opened the windows further to let go of them too.
So why write this? To begin that process again and possibly to help someone else who has something that they want to let go of but can’t because their perception of forgiveness is holding them back as it was for me too.
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