perhaps we should try this again?

I've been thinking a lot about forgiveness lately. What it means to forgive someone - to truly release yourself from any kind of pain or injustice that you've endured. What it actually means to be free. It's been with ease anyone has ever encouraged the art of forgiveness to another. When it’s not your pain or your freedom dangling in the balance, it’s so easy to prompt someone to forgive.

I've been taught my entire life to forgive those who do wrong against me. After all, we're all human right? We all at one point or another, act in selfish disregard of another's feelings, only focusing on the sole pursuit of our own gratification. Who in their life hasn't chosen their own happiness over someone else's? At a very basic level of understanding, we do it every single day. From the simplest acts we perform in our homes, with our friends, around our family - altruism is an often desired, but never fully acquired trait. If I am, at any given point, only acting in my own self-regard, than I have to be able to conceive someone else doing exactly the same thing.

I understand forgiveness. I understand that holding bitterness, envy, grief, even hate...holding onto all of these things only serves to imprison a person. I understand forgiveness. One gains nothing when they continue to hold an injustice in their heart - after someone has betrayed a trust, spoken a lie, offered an unkind word.

I understand that fundamentally, forgiveness is supposed to allow freedom for YOU as the forgiver. It is a tool to set you, the burdened heart, free.

But what if the place where you once stood is so totally shaken, so foundationally corrupted, that what you once believed true now no longer seems so clear? What if the closest people lied, the realest truth’s proved fake, what if love proved not enough? What then?

I use to speak from a place of faith. I had faith in forgiveness and I encouraged it in others. And I guess, from a certain perspective I still believe in it. I don’t doubt its power to free you from another’s “mistake”, that beyond everything else, it allies itself most strongly with the one it’s used by. When the ground beneath you shakes however, forgiving isn't as easy you might imagine. 

You reach out for that strong virtue, the thing you know you’re supposed to do and you just can’t. You try. You get it!…it’s right, and you know eventually you’ll stand on firm ground once again – maybe not the same ground, but solid all the while. You know one day it’ll be a distant memory. Love will be enough again one day. What if however, despite all of this you can’t forgive? 

Are you trapped forever?

Are you forever incapable of letting go?

….or maybe you just keep trying. You keep trying to forgive, if only for you. There seems a fine line right now, right here with my thinking – one that holds between a dark side of mistrust that is dreary, spiteful, beaten and broken. I am none of those things. The other side is bright, spontaneous, honestly ambitious, expansive, sunshine radiates throughout…I am not really any of those things either.

I am walking the fine line of forgiveness. I am trying to forgive others and myself every day in every mistake. Dare I slip and fall and be lost forever to either side of the war, I will continue to tread the line and find forgiveness. It isn't bullshit when I search for positivity, it doesn't make me dumb. Trying to let go doesn't make me stupid. I want more for myself.

What happens when you try and forgive someone who broke you in a deep and dark way, and you just can’t? ...Perhaps you try again.