4.30.13

A little introspective this evening...

One thought or theme I've continued to revisit over the last couple of years is forgiveness; my forgiveness of others, others' forgiveness of me, forgiveness from God, self-forgiveness. The first has been and is the easiest. I've been blessed to have been surrounded by great people in all of my walks of life; it's not as if I've suffered greatly from anyone but even in instances where people may have wronged me, hurt me, whatever, I bear no grudges toward anyone, harbor no anger toward anyone. Being cognizant of my own many faults and failings, past and present, has helped make it easy for me to accept and forgive occasional faults and failings of others. As for others' forgiveness of me I am aware of- most- of the harm and wrong I may have caused others over the years. If possible I've tried to make amends for, or at the very least apologize to, those that I've hurt or harmed. Where that hasn't been possible I've tried (with varying degrees of success) to adopt a pay-it-forward mindset, trying to do better by people in my life now to, in hopefully some way, make up for times past when I didn't do as well by people and cannot make that up to them now. If nothing else I hope that, as time has passed, I, and any bad behavior on my part, are irrelevent to others today. And I received absolution roughly two years ago prior to undergoing surgery which, if you believe in it, should have set me kind of right with God (So I got that goin' for me, which is nice... to quote Carl Spackler!) I haven't been to confession since but I do get to mass at least a few times each month so, again, hopefully I'm at least ok on that score.

Self-forgiveness... well, that's been a bit more difficult. I had someone comment to me recently: I think you can flog yourself with the best of them. I don't know if I'd say that. I am aware of my many faults, failings, etc... in so many aspects of my life; things that I've done wrong and, just as much, things that I've failed to do right. I do realize that we all have our faults, our failings; I'm not unique. Where I have difficulty is in the moving forward from part; I have the mindset that moving on from- forgiving- myself, absent specifically correcting and/or making amends for past missteps, mistakes- sins- is tantamount to abrogating responsibility for them, to dismissing them, to letting myself off the hook without having made things right. And where I'm likely looking at a shorter window of opportunity to make things right it can be frustrating to not be able to develop that self-forgiveness, to create a better sense of personal peace. I commend those who are able to do so.

I'm the only one who can do that for me.