Monday, July 20, 2009

Forgive Yourself First

I am currently on the road back to Syracuse and I know that it has been a few days since my last post. I wanted to write something. I originally was going to write about Disney but I will save that for later in the week. As usual, the urge to write something else has hit me. Let me start by asking you to forgive any typos since I am writing this entry from my phone.

Funny that I am asking forgiveness when this the subject on my mind. One thing I have noticed over my trip when talking to family is that someone is always upset or mad at someone else within the family for a whatever reason. Not matter how stupid or serious the reason it always seems to be a reason that causes angst. Of course if you love someone and they do something that hurts you it will always be difficult to deal with. Family will always be the first to hurt us.

Looking at it from a view of a friendship or relationship, depending how deep it is, the pain of someone hurting us can be just as great or even greater especially if love is involved. Most of the time the reaction to being hurt is the same. We deal with it and move on. However there are those times when we cannot deal and a relationship needs to end because of it. We find it hard to forgive another person.

Forgiveness is the hardest part of love. It is hard to let go of someones wrong doing. More importantly, it is hard to forgive ourselves for putting ourselves in the situation in the first place. Let's not forget that we can also be the ones that hurt other people. So in either case, forgiveness is hard to come by because we tend to be hard on ourselves. I cannot begin to say how much I blame myself for the things that have gone wrong in my life. But eventually, I need to move on and forgive myself because on the end I have to look in the mirror.

More importantly, by forgiving myself, I can forgive others. I can let go of all the negatives and mistakes of the past. This is the best way to love. We all know people make mistakes and we all know that there are some evil people as well. None of that matters. It takes too much energy to hate someone. The stress and angst of being angry is not good for us. It is all part of letting go.

I worry about several people in my life. They lack the ability to let go. My father is one of these people. For as much good as he has done for me, he has so much pent up anger for relatives and people in general who have done him wrong. Nice people tend to get taken advantage of and it is a sad part of life, but we can turn that around by forgiving the fools who hurt us.

3 comments:

Arthur Otero said...

It is what it is. your Dad

Brooke said...

I always tell people - forgiveness isn't for the person who wronged you, it's for YOU. When you hold onto anger and hurt, the person who hurt you has power over you. When you let it go, they lose the power. It's really just that simple.

Forgive them, then forgive yourself.
Freedom.

Great post Ant.

Jeri said...

sometime the only way to have a healthy relationship with someone is not to have one at all. best advice ive ever received, followed by "your opinion of me is none of my business"

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