The forgiveness stick

"But how difficult it is to sometimes forgive; how unfair it seems to reward offence with compassion. Yet, despite our intuitions, despite the seeming insanity of the enterprise, we must try, because forgiveness can be the way to self-preservation. 

Forgiveness is an act of self-love where the malignancy you have endured can become the motivating force that helps enlarge the capacity of the heart."

Nick Cave The Red Hand Files

We all have endured both sides of the forgiveness stick. We tie ourselves together with bonds of guilt, anger and get entangled even more as resentment gets added over time. This resentment might have become so much part of who we are that we do not even know how to move forward without that thing we've been hauling along all this time. We may call it pride or ego, but it's not even that.

We look at it all wrong.

“Forgiveness requires a sense that bad behaviour is a sign of suffering rather than malice.”
Alain de Botton

As Alain de Botton states in his article, we all have a history. We all have those irritating flaws that latched on as we developed through life and didn't work through it. Mostly it is no fault of our own. We are shaped by our circumstances and do things we've long forgotten why we do them.

In light of this, we can see that every wrongdoing or irritating behaviour by others come with a back story we are not aware of. They have to endure the same by us. It will do us well to enlarge the capacity of our hearts by forgiving others, even when we do not understand their actions. As they will have to do the same for us when the time comes.

"My view of human nature is that all of us are just holding it together in various ways — and that’s okay, and we just need to go easy with one another, knowing that we’re all these incredibly fragile beings."
Alain de Botton

Go, slap someone with the forgiveness stick.