Getting caught up in drama and feuds, Forgive often represents a bright light at the end of a tunnel, which steps in to restore harmony and peace. It is called upon to reconcile differences, having an innate ability to blow arguments out of the water when trivial disputes get out of hand. Every so often, Forgive holds it breath and then exhales once it goes off duty wondering if it acted inappropriately just to calm the waters. It didn’t consider itself to be dishonest, although it was aware that, in a teeny-weeny way, it may speak to appease a situation. It simply had a secret love affair with Peace and being calculating had its advantages. Keeping the peace can be a commendable thing to do and Forgive usually went about its business quietly!
A simple phrase of kindness can often neutralise the irritation brought about by either human error or a minor act of mischievousness that went slightly pear-shaped. Forgiving can be an honourable thing to do and a humbling experience for both parties involved. Sometimes we just forgive naturally and then no more gets said on the subject; soon after, the dispute is forgotten. This is of course until a similar situation arises and the previous business that had been dealt with so eloquently suddenly grapples with an ego that had stayed remarkably quiet but decides to re-engage in churlish behaviour. This isn’t the case for everyone. This behaviour may just reflect a lack of sincerity that was lurking behind your initial deliverance to set someone emotionally free. The fact that a similar situation has arisen is an indication that an earlier dispute is unresolved. Either that or someone is taking someone for a ride – they keep making the same mistake and you keep on forgiving. A temporary stopgap in a relationship is entertained by forgiveness.
Unhealthy relationships can thrive on Failure, Fear, Guilt and Need. Forgive works alongside these characters, appealing to their better nature to work through their insecurities. They have each been through battles in an attempt to understand their own limitations and strive for acceptance. Forgive is always learning and developing, as it too has to come to terms with its own feelings and the impact of its actions. Forgive couldn’t be malicious if it tried. It has a sense of duty to work with all the emotions along your path. This is because underneath every emotional obstacle which houses conflict, Forgive asks you to take the opportunity to look at it from two angles. Firstly, is there anything about yourself that requires ‘your own’ forgiveness and secondly, does the area that feels most conflicted include someone else?
Forgive performs at its best when it collaborates with Honest and Humble. Do you need to forgive yourself for being… ‘too hard on yourself’? This merely clouds your judgement and makes any chance of seeing the wood for the trees impossible. If, on any part of your journey so far, you sense that you have held yourself back, can you now allow yourself to be forgiven and move forward? How we communicate with ourselves is interesting. We are capable of working out many of our issues on our own. What are often in the way of making room for any sensible conversations with our higher self are those trees! We tend to focus on the limiting emotions that branch off in all directions and we miss the beauty that lies within the flora and fauna below our feet, which help to keep us grounded.
If you feel conflicted and recognise that the challenge to forgive someone else is going to be the hard part, then you can start by forming a self-help group! Gather up all the emotions you reckon are involved in this burden and get them talking to each other. Find some common ground and look at any dependencies between them that need to be broken. Respect your emotions and listen to their stories before you drown them with any self-importance. Then you are ready to make a more informed decision.
Now and then, Forgive is asked to conjure up sizeable amounts of forgiveness when it simply isn’t ready to do so, although forgiveness itself probably only comes in one size. Once it has decided to present forgiveness as a gift, then the amount provided is irrelevant. The focus is more likely to be on the chain of events that will lead up to that decision being made and take the most effort. It is the amount of time taken up, included in the internal and external dialogue, which goes into the pursuit of finding inner peace.
A person can either forgive or they can’t. Forgiveness is either at the end of a short or lengthy process – or it isn’t. If, after an emotional rollercoaster of deliberations, forgiveness is not the answer or a person is not ready to forgive, then it isn’t something that can be quantified. It works like Trust and cannot be partly awarded. Forgiveness is not something you must do but, rather, something you can choose to do because you want to or need to; the reason for either decision is up to you. Is the need to forgive a desire or a necessity? Sometimes forgiving is hard to do and it doesn’t always come naturally. In the case it feels unnatural, then plenty more can be said and things are less likely to be forgotten in a hurry.
Up until now we have seen that Forgive, like all of us, has good days and bad days. Some days it toddles off to work and irons out a few hiccups and no one gets hurt. It swoops in like a superhero and saves the day leaving little collateral damage to tidy up. On other days, it gets involved in a difficult project only to discover that it ends up questioning itself and the integrity of the task in hand. It debates whether to forgive or not and when it concludes that forgiveness is the best course of action, it can find another reason to retract its proposal to forgive and has a dilemma on its hands.
This dilemma persuades Forgive to remain indecisive until it is finally assaulted by an influx of emotions whose sole purpose is to put its intentions to the test. Once it overcomes that barrier with flying colours and has convinced its heart, first and foremost, that it is going to execute its plan to forgive, then another challenge arrives.
What is the methodology required to go from A: choosing to forgive through to Z: delivering the package? What does it need to consider by way of coping strategies as it comes out of its comfort zone (a place in which it understood its own emotional boundaries) and puts itself amidst a head-on collision with vulnerability, as Forgive hurtles towards goal Z?! Who would do such a thing?! I use the word hurtles because in this context when you move out of your comfort zone, everything around you can appear to move so fast. It is a new experience and requires a little kindness on your part to guide you through the maze, until your balance is restored.
So now you are back on your feet, having lingered long enough in Tree Pose, you can fully embrace the journey ahead along a new stretch of path. Everything you experience hereafter will collectively add up and help you reach your end goal. You may feel like you will lose a small part of yourself along the way, yet gain something else in return for your efforts. You will multiply all the times you said, “I can’t do this”, by one hundred and then divide that answer by one common denominator: Resilience. Resilience says, “Yes you can…” and it gets personal!
It takes personal resilience to come out the other side of any painful experience. If survival alone is your end goal then finding the courage to journey on, when there is no room to accommodate the word forgiveness, will remain your first priority. However, if you feel burdened by your own misery which seems to be in the process of multiplying tenfold and weighing you down, then you may need to clear some head space and make more room for negotiations between Misery and Forgive. Even if this initially applies to forgiving ourselves for umpteen things for which we probably didn’t need to chastise ourselves in the first place.
Forgive is turning out to be quite the ‘applied mathematician’ after all. Applying maths to other disciplines in life is right up its street. For example, it suggests that if you can forgive, then you may feel better about whatever it is that made you unhappy. What if the magic formula looks something like this: To forgive = feeling better in some way! It doesn’t identify who for and it doesn’t provide any granularity in this equation to how forgiving does bring about that particular result. It is a sweeping statement that happens to have the equality sign sitting in the middle as if each side of the equation is dependent on the other being i
n existence.
What part of yourself do you ‘tap into and work alongside’ when you contemplate forgiveness? You lug around your emotional toolkit on your entire journey, mainly because you don’t know how much of yourself to give in order to forgive. It can be difficult to travel light, although the idea is to feel lighter once you have processed your thoughts and offloaded a few emotions that were weighing you down.
It doesn’t matter if you are striving to forgive someone else or yourself. An act of forgiveness has to start from a place of sincerity and what better place to start from than within you! Honest will aim to keep you on track as you attempt to understand why you are considering forgiveness in the first place and it will keep Blame at a healthy distance. Patience is heavily involved and will be supportive when the climb seems too daunting; it will sit with you as you contemplate and reflect.
Forgive thrived on self-expression. It sat on a logarithm, on the forest floor, and wondered how much effort it would take in order to get to the stage of feeling comfortable with serving up a portion of forgiveness. In other words, how many sensible conversations does it need to multiply in order to answer this question? It always had its maths head on and even if numbers didn’t provide all the answers they usually crept into a methodology somewhere.
A numerical expression is a mathematical sentence that contains numbers. It is not, as I first thought, anything to do with a number pouring out its feelings or voicing its excitement as it proclaims that “one add one equals two”. A number doesn’t get caught up in semantics, unlike words which have a habit of being put together only to be torn apart again by people who just want them to say something else – other than what they are saying at the time. And, we know by now that it is often the meaning of a sentence that sits under the microscope as the poor little words get manipulated.
Arithmetic deals with the manipulation of numbers and when this happens, an arithmetic operation will have been involved (addition, subtraction, multiplication and division). There will always be a ‘given’, which is the result. But is a number just a number, no matter which way you look at it? How you reached that number is probably what counts; did you add ‘five to five’ to reach ‘ten’ or did you tot up ‘six and four’? Did you add ‘three to eight’ rubbing the last digit off in frustration, because you got your sums wrong, adding a zero instead?! Double figures can prove quite complicated. Using too many words can be equally exhausting. We have all come across people who have swallowed a dictionary. They are able to poetically populate a sentence with really long words. You can be left wondering what they all meant once the full stop silently props them up for evaluation.
Can we create a numerical expression for a set of feelings? I suppose if we could offer up a number to reflect an emotion then we could go around speaking and expressing ourselves in code, but would we really be understood? Maybe some of us are not particularly understood now using linguistics, never mind numbers – although numerology gets a little credit and is explained linguistically. Playing with numbers can be as much fun as playing with words. When it is simply the case of moving a few around, in order to come up with a successful formula or methodology that works for you, a Eureka moment can be quite exhilarating.
If forgiveness is the given (the result), then what is actually involved in the process leading up to forgiveness or in the act of forgiving? If feeling better is the given, once forgiveness has marched forth and multiplied, what has to actually take place in order for you to feel better?
Maths abides by rules which can be followed in order to bring about a specific result. Life itself doesn’t always appear to work in this way. Events unravel in no particular order – or do they? Life unfolds and sometimes the order of things, in which we would like them to happen, turns out to be somewhat different from what we had planned or originally intended. We grumble and wish that something else had happened first – but it didn’t! We want something to magically appear so we can do what we thought we wanted to do – but it doesn’t. Sometimes we are pleased about that, later on in life.
Sometimes dependencies have to exist. A+B needs to happen before C+D can take place. Maybe you want to reach F quickly but you have to let E run its course. If you add A+D then E can’t happen and if you let B+C get together you could have an explosion on your hands. What if you never reach F? What if F stood for forgiveness and when you do manage to hold it in your hands, it doesn’t end up making you feel better when you finally give it away?!
Is it about the order of operations? Is it about processing your thoughts in any particular order or following a sequence which underpins your methodology? Think ‘maths’, for a moment, and consider the two numerical expressions below:
Figure 1:
1 + 2 x 3 = 9
Figure 2:
1 + 2 x 3 = 7
What did you see at first glance? If you calculated them both in sequence then you will be accusing me, within seconds, of making an error in Figure 2. But the latter is correct. A keen mathematician would know that you work it all out in order of operations and multiplication comes first. Of course, adding a couple of brackets into the equation, around the ‘1 and 2’, may have been useful, in Figure 1, if we wanted 9 to be the answer.
Maths lesson over!
My point is: we don’t always see things correctly. Later, we may come to realise that some of the answers we saw, at first glance, simply don’t add up. Sometimes in life, something may catch our eye (or we hear a word) and we can jump to conclusions and get in a muddle. If someone is colour blind, depending on which colour cone cells are defective, this may determine which colours they see. When someone looks at a sentence, depending on where the commas are situated, the meaning may be open to interpretation. Also, just because a word is used in a sentence the full meaning may still not be understood (as the writer intended) because it lacks context and can be taken to mean something different to different people.
When you lay all your facts and feelings on the table in readiness to forgive, what you do in order to bring about that result may not stare you in the face and sit in any logical order. What if you don’t know what to add or subtract? What if you don’t know how much white to add to red to make it a rosier picture? What if the words you wrote down, as you emptied your mind, suddenly sound different once they are airlifted off the paper and vocalised? You spell the letters out, counting them all in case you left one behind, and realise that joined-up writing never did make anything easy to read – or understand. A squiggle here and a loop over there – a seven begins to look like a one. You need to attend a TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) course before you can even coach others on personal resilience overseas… and teach maths!
We interpret things differently and deal with conflict in a variety of ways as we pack our emotions into our toolkits in unequal measures. Another perspective may help or, at the very least, give you time to decide if your first thoughts were, in fact, correct. Later, you may choose to ignore any feedback, yet feel appreciative that the advice offered served as a positive interruption, allowing your own thoughts the space to reflect.
Incidentally, if you do wish to improve your maths, because you want to become an architect or an accountant, please find a professional teacher as Forgive hasn’t qualified yet and I’m a bit rusty in that department.
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Operation Forgiveness
It is understandable that there will be glitches in the process. We are human. What sounded like a good idea last night as you soaked up a glass of Chablis or bathed in a bath of bubbly seems quite unreasonable the next day. Doing things in the heat of the moment to keep the peace, as you chant “I forgive you” three times, isn’t always good practice but you decide to start somewhere anyway.
Events in order of operation could look something like this:
(A + Exfoliate – Toxins + Patience) / Reflection x Honesty = Z
Exfoliate
People romanticise and like to encourage forgiveness without knowing the full story and it is often conjecture. You know if something is forgivable and the lengths you are prepared to go or the feelings you are prepared to let go of in order to forgive. You are the one who has to work through the layers of oppression before you feel comfortable in your own skin. Having removed a few dead cells which were blocking your pores, you can let your skin breathe and begin to glow; this will help the toxins rise to the surface and say farewell.
Remove toxins
The notion that forgiving can cleanse implies that impurities exist and have to be removed. If forgiving can help purge the soul then maybe that would allow you to walk a more peaceful journey. For some people, forgiving can be cathartic. Forgiveness doesn’t mean you forget but maybe you feel compelled to draw a line under a situation. This can prevent any further emotional contamination as a result of misguided emotions crossing over into another relationship and becoming toxic.
Be patient
It usually takes patience to work through feelings. If you are not a feely type of person, you can still allow Patience to guide you through the process that will lead you to a sustainable end goal. The one that says, “Yes I forgive and I promise I won’t retract that or bring it back up when we fall out again!” Patience just asks you to try… that’s all. Patience says, “Give it a go and see how you feel”.
Emotional Sandwiches Page 22