Forgive the Past. It is Over.

“Forgive the past. It is over. Learn from it and let go. People are constantly changing and growing. Do not cling to a limited, disconnected, negative image of a person in the past. See that person now. Your relationship is always alive and changing.” - Messages from the Masters by Brian Weiss

I have a friend, Elizabeth, who never forgave her father. When the topic of dads would come up, she would state something she didn’t like about this man.

He was too distant, not helpful enough, didn’t have his priorities straight, or he was never there when she actually needed him. That is what she would say.

Sometimes people around her would get uncomfortable because if they happened to mention something positive about their own father, she would make it a point to say that her Dad did not have that quality. Many people enjoy talking up their fathers and showing them in their best light. She would talk hers down.

I’ve never met her father, so I don’t know his side of the story, but I know that she virtually never sees this man. Yet, she does talk about him, even if what she has to say is often negative. He occupies her mind, but there is something about him that she never let go of. She never forgave him for something.

Clearly, Elizabeth never let go of something that happened in the past.

Or maybe it was something that didn’t happen. I understand that her father was a truck driver, and so perhaps when she was growing up, he wasn’t as available for her as he would have liked or as she would have liked. Perhaps she needed more from him, and he was not there to give it.

Yet Elizabeth is now an adult, in her 40s. I can tell that she has still not forgiven her father. She has not even sought a real connection with him, as in her adulthood, it seems she has turned the tables on him. She perceived him as distant in her childhood. Now, she is the one who is distant toward him. When he has tried to reach out to her, she told me that she would sometimes purposely ignore his calls. If he invited her to meet, sometimes she would decline.

This is a man who she very rarely even sees or hears from. Yet she doesn’t let him close – she keeps him away as if he were a stranger.

No one ever tells us this, but forgiveness is hard work. We have to work to see a perception we have built of someone as just that, a perception. It is a temporary way of seeing someone at a point in time.

But consider this:

We are all in flux, changing, growing, evolving, and time can make us stronger or wither us away. If we hold onto our perception of someone from the past too stubbornly, we permanently grasp at a temporal event.

And this is as ludicrous as it sounds, like grasping at fog and hoping to catch some of it in our hands.

Keep in mind that forgiveness is something we choose to do on our own. Often, we are the only ones in control of this. No one else can induce you to forgive.

In the 10th grade, Jeffrey, a friend of mine, asked me, “Why were you so mean to me in the 7th grade?”

I had vague memories of this by then. But I could grasp just enough of the memories to see that, yes, I had been a terrible person to this friend of mine. My other friends and I had often made Jeffrey the butt of our jokes. I don’t think we were purposely malicious toward him, but upon reflection, I could see that we had indeed been mean to him, without any reason.

By the 10th grade, even after Jeffrey discussed his issues with me about our past, he remained friends with me. It must have been true, hard work for him to contend with what we had put him through. And I doubt it was of much consolation to him that I didn’t recall what we had done very well, whereas the details must have been seared into his memories. He held onto what happened, but at the same time, he was willing to forgive and let it go.

Personally, I lean toward letting things go, moving on, and working on building up friendships and kinships. We should strive to forgive. But of course, we all have a breaking point. Perhaps some things cannot be forgiven when someone has gone too far, and then we must all ask ourselves what that point is.

What is the point of no return?

My friend Dr. Bob Rich (found at Bobbing Around - a wonderful resource on improving our lives and the world), a clinical psychologist, has said that “Normal is the walking wounded.” Here, I understand him to mean that most people are holding onto emotional pain in their lives. Of course, there is physical pain too. But one way or another, most of us are suffering in some way. And if not suffering presently, we are often subjected to memories of a prior suffering that we went through – yet, this is suffering too, even if self-imposed. There are countless ways that someone may suffer, unfortunately.

When you struggle to forgive someone, I will urge you to remember that we all have our personal pain points. We have all been through our personal suffering, which is probably not known publicly to the world around us. Even those who choose “bad paths” in life have suffered their share.

I’ve made it a point in my life to forgive people, and I hope you do too.

Consider this: A dear friend of mine was kidnapped last year and robbed. At first, of course, I was upset. But upon reflection, I decided to forgive the perpetrators for what they had done, as I saw great pains and suffering in the past’s of these criminals, and likely for that to continue in their future. What person with a good life would commit such a crime? They wouldn’t. These were broken, disturbed people. They were clear examples of the “walking wounded.”

I forgave them from afar, in my heart, as I don’t know who they are.

Forgiveness isn’t easy. It is hard work. But this is something worth working on, especially with the relations that truly matter in our lives.

Today I ask: Is there someone worth forgiving in your life? If that person is no longer with us, you can still forgive them in your heart.