The necessary cliché of forgiveness
“If forgiveness were as common a concept as the books of Scripture that urge it down humanity’s throat, all the world would be freshly laundered, cleansed of all hatred and hung out to dry. So why won’t we open our hearts to it?”
Until very recently, I was of the staunch belief that the concept of forgiveness is one that is alien to all of humanity. There is the ability to accustom oneself to the fact that one has been wronged by another, and then there is a constant undertone of resentment that makes one believe another is obligated to continuously make up for something they have done in the past. And then you have forgiveness which preaches the idea of clean, blank slates for people with dirty histories. It suggests the idea of a fresh start, a new harvest, new resolutions, new vows and new beginnings. If forgiveness were as common a concept as the books of Scripture that urge it down humanity’s throat, all the world would be freshly laundered, cleansed of all hatred and hung out to dry. So why won’t we open our hearts to it?
We know that we need to forgive and to be forgiven. Yet we carry the baggage into the future with us because we mould our identities around the things that we have done and the things that have happened to us. People, in our eyes, become two-dimensional products of their actions. I once wrote into my journal, “sometimes people are one thing for long enough, we forget that they were ever anything else.”
If someone we tirelessly criminalise lays their soul bare for us to prod and prick at, expressing remorse and regret, revealing that their nights have been riddled with guilt, we are at an absolute loss for words. This is because the lines become blurred. A sword is essentially a mere piece of metal, and in our eyes it will be either vengeful or defensive, but it will never be what it is. I am realising now that the reason I so devotedly tie labels to people is because I am a poet, and I need to have the clarity that comes along with viewing things through a needlessly complicated lens. My friend told me that he recently read a tweet that said, “We get it, poets. Things are like other things.” We then proceeded to marvel at the fact that it took less than one fifty characters to make us realise the unnecessary nature of the hurdles that stand in the way of us achieving necessary things.
“Nobody ever thinks of crescents when there are full moons.”
Forgive. Sometimes all it takes to set our life in perspective is to realise that we make mountains out of nothing. People will do things to us that change the course of our entire lives, that take who we are and change everything about us. But those people too, will change. The villain in our story will not be the villain in every story. Sometimes, the villain turns good. Other times, the ‘good villain’ is a tactic employed to exploit one’s naivety.
“There are no black holes, only all that sunshine.”
Open your heart, but do not close your mind. Let yourself fill with compassion and forgiveness, but always remember you can never be made vulnerable unless you allow yourself to be. You can never be anything unless you allow yourself to be. So allow yourself to forgive. Lines will be blurred and lives will be turned upside down, but the earth will keep spinning on its orbit and it will wait for none of us. Eventually, we will accustom ourselves to the new version of things, the flip side to the villain that the hero did not expect to ever see. Start as many fires as you like, but have the common decency to realise you must be the one to put them out. Forgive.
“You were never here, only traces.”
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