On Forgiveness
“The hardest thing is to forgive, but God does /
Even if you murdered or robbed, it’s wrong, but God loves /
Take one step toward him, He takes two toward you /
Even when all else fail, God supports you.”
Three character traits in somebody that impress me more than anything else.
The first is knowledge of self; straightforward in theory, ridiculously difficult in practice, already covered ad nauseam in Blind Spots.
The second is a knowledge of history, which I suppose isn’t really a character trait, but I have to put it on here. Knowledge of history is a linear function in the sense that there is no way to learn it without putting thousands of hours into reading books. No one is born with a leg up in this field, all respect is earned, and if I had to pick the five men I know who I look up to and admire the most, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that four of them are walking historical encyclopedias. I think there is something about uploading the known story of man to your mind that refines your outlook on life, rounds out your character and puts guardrails on what to expect from human nature.
The third character trait?
Forgiveness.
I know a few people who have mastered this and am convinced it is some form of supernatural Übermensch power, a God-mode trait for navigating life.
Unlike a knowledge of history, forgiveness is cultivated and not innate. Yes, to some degree, there are people who were born with a cooler temperament and longer fuse, but there is no denying the fact that forgiveness flies in the face of all natural human instincts.
Think about what you see from the majority of men, the average, the mediocre, the non-thinkers. They lack empathy and pass judgment on everything. They fly off the handle constantly and are burdened with angry and undisciplined minds that condemn everything—while blindly ignoring the fact that all the things they condemn lay within themselves. Deflection and projection are a toxic combination, and the truth, as anyone with an amateur-level understanding of psychology can attest, is that most of these people hate themselves and are confused about it.
How does forgiveness run counter to all of this? It goes hand-in-hand with a complete lack of judgment. It makes you dig deep. It displays the deepest level of empathy because it forces you to stop, pause and reflect, and think about whether the things that you castigate in another man are also lurking within you. And so in a way it ties to the first trait—knowledge of self—because in the words of Jung, knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people.
It is very hard to understand how impressive forgiveness is as a trait until you take a good, hard look in the mirror and assess your own skill at it. You will quickly realize there is a reason that this trait is granted only to the spiritually sublime, to mythological heroes and to the saints of lore. It is the highest aim of the Stoics, it is the ability to turn the other cheek, and it represents a man’s power to return any and all evil with good. As I’ve written in pretty much every single post, hard choices, easy life, and there is no harder choice you will ever make than to forgive.
“There was only one path out of the wilderness, and that path was forgiveness. I had to learn it and learn it fast. All the negativity and hatred were clogging up my headspace at a time when I needed every square inch of it. The best advice I got was that forgiveness has nothing to do with the other person—it’s for you. Find a way to put yourself in their shoes, find a reason to forgive, blast it all out of your skull permanently, and then keep moving. The harder the choice, the easier the life, and some of the hardest choices I’ve come across have been learning how to silently forgive others on the spot when they wrong you. It’s hard because forgive doesn’t necessarily mean forget. Those knife scars are still in the tree and they’ll be there until the end of time.”
I wasn’t very mindful of this topic until four or five years ago, when I realized that an inability to forgive does nothing except ensure that your headspace remains turbid, frothy and a bright shade of red. You can’t accomplish anything meaningful when there’s a war in your attic. So really, you are winning on both counts: you are doing right not just by your fellow man in the act of showing kindness and generosity in the midst of a cold and unforgiving world, but you are doing right by yourself in the process. Perfect forgiveness completely eradicates anger. Since coming to understand this, forgiveness is something I have practiced almost religiously, and all I know is that it is both the most important and most difficult skill you can ever hope to master. It is the hallmark of the most powerful type of man: one who keeps his passions controlled by the firm grip of reason.
At the societal level, think about crime and punishment. When a crime is committed, or when someone ends up in the papers, the natural and immediate reaction from the mob is for the offender to be burnt at the stake in the town square. This is what you should always expect from the average individual and from the unforgiving mob, because once again (taps sign)—forgiveness flies in the face of all natural human instincts. It is the harder choice, it is the bigger man who is able to stop, temper the fires within him, practice objectivity, dig for the deepest levels of empathy and spend time visualizing the circumstances that preceded the other man’s action. Easy choices, hard life. Hard choices, easy life.
Forgiveness is unconditional. This is what makes it so incredibly challenging: you must be able to apply it to any and all situations. There is no I forgive a lot of things, but I just can’t forgive that. Like, you’re wrong. You’re no different than the average man if you think that way, because everyone has their own system of weights and measures, their own subjective scale of moral relativism, and this lack of objectivity is the core of all hypocrisy. There is one thing I can promise you for certain: if all the dirt that you have ever done in your entire life was revealed for the world to see, your opinion on what should and shouldn’t be forgiven would be rendered null and void. Hence the saying let he who is without sin cast the first stone, and hence why the harshest condemnation comes from the mob and not from the individual, because the mass of the unforgiving mob eliminates the concept of individual accountability. Bottom line, you have not won the game of life until you can forgive not just this thing or that thing, but everything.
I have one friend who is the best forgiver I know, for lack of a better word. He doesn’t know a lot about history. I wrote earlier that there were five people I look up to the most, and four of them are walking encyclopedias…well, this is the fifth person. The missing link. The professional forgiver. If I had to force-rank everyone by the maxim of be the bigger man, then he is one of the biggest men I’ve ever met.
I asked him how he got so good at forgiveness, and his reply was simple: Life is better light on your feet.
This is the way, fam. This is the way.
Walk with God,
GB
