“Time is funny stuff,” says Hap in the movie Always. In our human experience on Earth, time relentlessly marches on and we grow up and change. While many of our personality traits appear to be fixed, the fact is that who I Am today is not the same as who I was yesterday. And I most certainly am not the person I was 10, 20 or 30 or more years ago.
But for many people, what they knew of someone “back in the day” becomes set in stone as who that person is forever. Even though our clothes change, our hair changes, our thoughts and even our memories change, we seem sometimes to forget that people too can and do change.
Forgiveness takes time. I’ve heard people say you can forgive but you don’t have to forget what was done. I’ve thought about this a lot as I have worked to forgive others by whom I’ve been hurt as well as to forgive myself for rash or stupid choices I’ve made. What I’ve discovered is that it is actually practically impossible to truly forgive while we keep fresh our memory of the pain, the hurt, the actions that required forgiveness in the first place—in a word, you must forget in order to forgive.
If I am trying to forgive but I have not forgotten the pain, the anger, humiliation, sadness, grief, or whatever other emotions resulted from the action...I cannot really forgive. This does not mean I blindly allow others to harm me emotionally, spiritually, or physically in the future. I can forgive and still choose in a loving way to release people from my heart.
I believe in the power of forgiveness with forgetting because I Am not who I was yesterday and neither are you.
(C) 2021 SZing. Spiritual Creator. All rights reserved. Photos courtesy of Pixabay.
