BRAVERY 52 | List 45
LIST 45 | List the ways you have forgiven others, moved on, and let go.
It took a while to wrap my head around the concept that everyone is doing the best they can.
Really. And it’s nice to know I’m in good company with this thought:
“All I know is that my life is better when I assume that people are doing their best. It keeps me out of judgment and lets me focus on what is, and not what should or could be.”
It may not be my best, or the best deserved by others, but it is their best. Sometimes, oftentimes, their best is pitiful, angry, lazy, manipulative, disrespectful, uninformed, cruel and selfish. For an abundance of reasons, it’s the best they can do at the time. Will they learn to be better? Maybe. Maybe not. We can only show up as we are, who we are, what the world has moulded us to be.
I’ve learned that forgiveness is not for those who have created pain, but for me. It releases me from being tied to situations or people I can no longer tolerate in my life. Or, if you prefer, from Karen Salmanson “Hating someone makes them important. Forgiving them makes them obsolete.”
Years ago, I forgave my mother for being one of the worst human beings to ever walk the earth - she’s in a very exclusive group of destructive narcissists. She was a horrible person and sometimes I have to catch my breath, startled by the reminder that she is a part of my DNA. Though perhaps her penchant for lying and play-acting may help me in my writing endeavours! I’ve done my level best to live a life of love, kindness, generosity, and truth - all things she was incapable of experiencing. (I’ve forgiven, not forgotten.)
More recently, I forgave the father of my children for being selfish, weak and angry. He was who I thought I deserved at the time I was with him, I clearly did not have a high regard for myself. The scars he left on my children will be with them forever. Can they forgive him? I don’t know. I hope they do. At the same time, I hope that they find it in their hearts to forgive me for not making things right sooner (maybe 2003 instead of 2011!) I’ve done my best to make it up to each of them at every opportunity.
We all do the best we can, with what we have, wherever we happen to be. (Paraphrased from Theodore Roosevelt) It is in that belief that I’ve been able to find forgiveness.