Forgiveness

Forgiveness is a conscious, voluntary decision to let go of resentment, bitterness, and anger towards someone who has hurt you.  It is aimed at personal peace and emotional healing rather than forgetting the offense or reconciling with the wrongdoer.

Forgiveness is not forgetting the event but releasing the emotional hold that it may have over you.

Forgiveness is a release of resentment and anger.

Forgiveness is the intentional and voluntary process by which one changes their feelings and attitude toward the offender and in so doing overcomes the impact of the offense, including negative emotions like resentment and a desire for vengeance.

Vengeance!  Vengeance is mine!

Forgiveness helps me.  It releases me.  I try to compare the impact of a wrong done to me with the slow, grinding pain that I endure while plotting revenge for that wrong.  It's a slaughter.  It's not close.  

Forgiveness is the sweetest revenge.

Always forgive your enemies - nothing will annoy them more.

This is all plagiarized from brilliant thinkers and seers and sages across time.  Except for one little bit that's mine.  How hard is it to forgive and how wonderful the benefits!  That we're shocked about this is what's shocking.  How easy it is to nurse a grudge, to feed it well, keep it warm and safe while it grows from a mouse to a T-Rex.

Ozzie and Montaigne and Ralphie . . . Sitting in a Tree . . . .

Sometimes things make sense and sometimes I'm clueless.  I'm clueless more often than I'd like to be but I'm encouraged by the fact that I'm not always clueless and that some of the time the bouts of cluelessness aren't absolute.  I was lost in the wheels of confusion.  I was the guy that other people were watching and saying: "That dude has no clue."

Here's a side note: for a while when I was struggling to come to terms with the concept of a Higher Power I considered using Ozzy Osbourne.  I was vaguely aware that this wasn't a great idea but being vaguely aware of anything was a big step up from being completely clueless.  I figure I could do worse.  Here are sample lyrics which explain why he was even a candidate:

Lost in the wheels of confusion,

Spinning through valleys of tears.

Eyes full of angry delusion,

Hiding in everyday fears.

I heard these lyrics and they buried themselves deeply into my subconscious immediately.

Ironically, most of the lyrics were written by the bass player Geezer Butler who was a seriously religious kid and seriously considered entering the priesthood.  Go figure and before you judge someone in a band called Black Sabbath mayhaps you should keep an open mind.

Sometimes I have a topic which I write about and sometimes I don't.  So here I am writing about Black Sabbath in a blog ostensibly about recovery.

Okay, let's go deep:
"The height of wisdom is to take things as they  are . . . to endure what we cannot evade."
Montaigne

Lest you look down your nose at me for worshipping Ozzy Osbourne consider this quote from Montaigne, one of the most influential writers of the French Renaissance.  He wrote in the 16th century which was a long time ago to be so smart.  Basically, this quote is a forerunner to The Serenity Prayer.  Have the wisdom to understand what you can do and what you cannot.  It's not always action.  Action is easier than waiting.

I once had a T-shirt that had two vultures sitting on a tree branch, one of them quipping: "Wait?  Dammit, I want to kill something."

"What must I do is all that concerns me - not what people think.  It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion, it is easy in solitude to live after our own - but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude."

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Now Ralphie was writing in the 20th century and so was Ozzy and Geezer so there's that.  Ralphie has as a core philosophy that the natural world was a living, spiritual canvas where God, humans, and the universe were deeply unified.  How cool is that shit?  I tell people all the time that if you're having trouble establishing your own personal Higher Power connection go outside in as quiet a place as you can manage and look around you, have a listen, because there's a lot going on and much of it is pretty cool.

"I greet the ups and downs of life's journey with unconditional love for myself and the people in my life by understanding that I am only truly alive in the present moment:  the future is a projection that does not exist."

The Toltecs

Error . . . . Uhhhhh . . . . One Day at a Time!

Negative Seaweed

"I grew up to have my father's looks, my father's attitude, my father's posture, my father's opinions, and my mother's contempt for my father."

Jules Feiffer

Negativity Bias: The human tendency to give more attention, weight, and value to negative words, experiences, and information than to positive ones of the same level.  They're more psychologically intense.  If you eat a good pear - it's delicious! - but if you eat a bad piece of meat - you're dead!

Starting out with a bad attitude, a suspicious one.

Tomorrow I have a cardiologist appointment in the morning and a dentist appointment in the afternoon.  I'm feeling some negativity here.  And I'm swimming before the appointments which doesn't count as a positive experience.

Luckily, we are not our thoughts.

I'm Listening . . . .

The awesome power of bouncing ideas off of another person, maybe someone you don't always agree with or with someone that you definitely disagree with.  Just listening to what someone with a different viewpoint has to say is an example of how I can practice extending grace.  It's important to have these exchanges of ideas.  Sometimes someone else has a better approach than me.  I have to remember that I thought a life of drug and alcohol use was a good - was the only solution to my angst and depression - when all it did was worsen the symptoms without addressing the root causes.  We need each other and we need our Higher Power to grow.  Talking back and forth sharpens and challenges each person's faith.

I've been edgy the last many days.  Hey, it happens.  Lean into the edgy.  Look at the edgy.  What is the lesson the edgy is trying to teach me?  My struggles occur when I try to get what I just think is the cause of the edginess into a chokehold and wrestle it to the ground, subdue the edgy.  I find my discomfort is heightened when I'm "off" somehow and don't exactly know why and, when this happens, little, minor upsets take on gigantic proportions.   I need to remember that an elephant is a mouse built to an alcoholic's specifications.  I am a certified Master Explosives Expert when it comes to taking something small and making a big explosion.

Originally the A.A. Program was built around Six Steps - not Twelve - but Bill, the Master Complicator had to double the total and I'm not saying this is a bad thing, just that Twelve is more than Six.  A lot more.  Twice as many.  Some of us occasionally simplify recovery to Three salient points:  Find God, clean house, help others.

My minister friend: "One result of the genuine bedrock Christian principle that all are welcome and all are forgivable, redeemable, is that it makes me more accepting of people who I once sneered at.  (Ed. Note: Good word, sneer is.  Sneer: A look, smile, or remark that shows scorn, contempt, or lack of respect.)  (My friend veers religious here, maybe more religious than I'm comfortable with but he's a minister for chrissake . . . )  "Christ showed me, made it ok for me to admit I'm as messed up as anybody, one of the most freeing feelings one can have .  . . not having to pretend to be so perfect or so normal, and this made me 100% more comfortable in my own skin."

How incredibly important it is to learn the skill of listening!  I had very little grasp of the concept of listening to someone else because I was so consumed with talking, with making sure I was getting my point across, I was being heard, that you understood me.  How many times have I heard a story I've heard once or twice or many times before.  Most people just want to be heard.  Most people figure things out on their own and the act of someone listening while they talk things out is all that's necessary.  I used to think they wanted my advice, they wanted me to tell them what to do, to solve their problems, this dude who needed a haircut and was obviously half-drunk and fully-high, THAT'S the dude who's got all the answers.  Sheesh.  The ego!  I have been cleaning out and organizing some old photos and occasionally I'll come across one of me where the image is so alarming I'll let out a yelp.

More Damn Grace

I think about meditation a lot.  I practice regularly.  I suck at it.  I have no idea how to do it effectively or how it's supposed to look.  And that's okay.  That is exactly what meditation is, sort of a clueless wandering awareness.  To me an apt analogy would be beginning to lift weights or to train for a marathon.  The important step is the first one - take a light weight and lift it or strap on a pair of running shoes that cost way more than is necessary for your first run.  There won't be any awareness of having taken a step toward a goal as you wheeze your way along, barely making it around the block, but without that initial gasping and choking for oxygen you sure as shit aren't going to get yourself in shape for a marathon.  I know in my personal meditation practice what has happened is that I find that I'm much calmer, much more present as I move through my day.  I'm not really aware of this calmness on a breath to breath basis but I know that life seems slower, more manageable, less alarming as the result of the meditation.  I don't jump to wild conclusions and act rashly - or as rashly, at least - as I used to.  People don't piss me off to the same degree.  When something pleasant happens I'm present enough to enjoy it and when something unpleasant happens, some pain or noxious stimuli or unwelcome encounter, I'm usually fine with it, not following it through to some wild, implausible conclusion.  "Eh, whatever" is a typical response.

Because I'm an Analogy Guy and because some of the teachers that I follow thrive on analogies, trying to give our tiny, rational minds some insight on how to approach meditation, I enjoy the imagery of little things changing while big things remain impermanent.  Sitting by a river and watching the constantly changing flow of water while noticing that the river is still a river - the water changes but the river endures.  Or watching clouds drifting across the sky, here for a moment and then gone, but the sky isn't going anywhere.  Lost in my thinking I'm drifting along through the clouds but then I burst through into the clear sky, into the sunshine, and voila! the sky is still there!  The clouds - my thoughts - are changing and intruding, as they should and they always have and they always will - but the sky - my awareness - will always be with me.

I talked to my old, dear friend yesterday - a retired banker and a retired pastor and how about the discord in that imagery? - about prayer and meditation.  It was so much fun to bounce ideas off of each other, his religious practice and my secular practice based on the non-traditional way that is Alcoholics Anonymous, and to see how much continuity there is between the two efforts, both of us, I think, striving to get to the same place, a place of love and understanding and perspective.  We talked about sweet, sweet grace and while I can get my dander ruffled a bit when I hear someone emphasize grace as a gift that an all-powerful God doles out I also listened as he emphasized how important it is to grant ourselves grace.  How many times I've listened to new people beating the shit out of themselves while trying to urge them to give their own damn self a break.

Gotta tell you that it was deeply, deeply satisfying to bounce these huge concepts off of another person - love and grace and the nature of God - not always agreeing but listening and pondering and finding many more points of agreement than of disagreement.  I'm quite taken with the imagery of water flowing down a river - the river doesn't change even though the water is constantly changing or watching clouds float by . . . the clouds move along but the sky is still there, is always there.

The Next 200 Miles: You and Your Tedious Thoughts

"Give us to go blithely on our business this day, bring us to our resting beds weary and content and undishonored, and grant us in the end the gift of sleep.

Robert Louis Stevenson

You are not your thoughts.

Most of your thoughts are the result of you simply revisiting what you have already thought before.  They're not new thoughts.  You are thinking about the same useless crap over and over.  These sticky thoughts are very, very sticky.  They're hard to shake loose and when they reoccur they take you hostage.  I relitigate wrongs all the time.  I hang onto a current irritation or upset with a ferocious grip.  I go back and think about issues that will always be issues: my health, my loved ones, my finances.  Sticky thoughts.  My Greatest Hits.  I'm dying!  I don't have enough money!  My loved ones will leave me!  Garbage Bag Guy will pile up more garbage bags!

I love the idea that each day we have 6,000 distinct thoughts and 90% of them are repetitive.  (Ed. Note: This is all kind of suspicious.  Who, exactly, is counting these thoughts?)

I went to high school with a man who I believe embodies humility.  He's a tremendous athlete, quite handsome, a graduate of Harvard who had a spectacularly successful business career in finance,  information that is almost impossible to extract and when I bring it up he deflects immediately, and not in a shallow, insincere way but with what I sense is a genuine humility.

When he was in his 50s he told me that he was attending Divinity School at night, that he wanted to become a minister.  I was floored.  I was flummoxed.  I was struck speechless and I'm never speechless.  I always have speech.  "When did you become religious?" I asked, no doubt with some overt skepticism.  He simply said: "I've always been religious."  I'm so used to over-the-top, in-your-face, look-at-me religious people, so on the lookout for the occasional sanctimonious asshole that I forget the world is full of people who pursue their ideal of a Higher Power with perspective and humility and true intent.

We were exchanging some text messages about an upcoming reunion and about some of his old correspondence to me when the discussion veered into grace.  Being a man of the cloth his ideal, of course and naturally, was to talk about the idea that grace is a godly, heavenly thing, given to mortals who don't deserve it and consequently the source of all that is good in this life. He also talked about the practical application of grace in our daily lives.  Being an iconoclast I prefer to emphasize grace the other way around, concentrating on simple, human grace instead of the divine kind, but we both end up in the same place: recognizing the otherworldliness of grace while applying it to our minute to minute existence.

His notes almost made me cry.  They were so passionate while remaining so sincere that they were obviously deeply held and unshakeable.  Isn't that what we're all looking for?  The surety that we've found a way to move forward in our lives with kindness and love, forsaking (Ed. Note: I'm getting full of myself.  This is a good Biblical turn of a phrase.  Dammit!) selfish motives and shallow pleasures?

Forgiveness Heals All Wounds

Grace:  A willingness to be fair and forgive; the exercise of love, kindness, mercy, favor.

I've always loved this concept, this quality.  In my Christian upbringing, grace was primarily described as God's unmerited, undeserved favor - his free gift of love, forgiveness, and strength given to me despite my sins.  Sigh.  This still irritates me.  It feels full of self-importance on God's part.  What a big guy you are, God!  We're made with faults and defects by God and then God forgives us for our faults and defects?  When I'm made the next creator of the universe?  Then I'm designing life so that there aren't these faults and defects that need to be forgiven. While I do believe in Divine grace and am grateful to receive it this still sounds to me like doing something nice and expecting recognition.  Today, in my day to day activities, I try to extend grace to everyone I come across and to do it with humility and a lack of ego.  This is not easy and I fail much of the time but I've gotten a lot better at giving everyone and everything a break and not doing it with too much self-importance and self-congratulation.  God or a Higher Power or the universe has bestowed so much grace to me, buried me under tons of grace, treated me with love and kindness when I didn't deserve it and so much more often then treating me poorly, that I feel a calling to try to return the favor, to pay it back.

My morning meditation book today: "We don't have to have all the answers, or act in the most mature way, or be the best friend ever.  There is room for error in everything because nothing is gained in perfection the first time around.  We can make mistakes because mistakes are sometimes the only way to perfection."

When that driver in front of me doesn't use his turn signal today I think: "Eh.  Guy made a mistake" instead of flying off into a judgemental rage.  I continue to practice pausing a beat when I don't like something, letting awareness and perspective seep in, finding that much of the time I roll my eyes at the thought that I could have gotten angry and ruined my day and not changed anything and for something so unimportant.  So I beep at the guy and make an obscene hand gesture?  This is going to correct something?  This is going to make the guy think: "Oh, man, you're right, sorry.  I won't do that again, ever?"  Nine times out of ten it's just going to provoke an equivalent response and then not only have I ruined my day I've degraded someone else's day as well.

"Forgiveness heals any wound."

The Toltecs, the Christians, the Jews, the Muslims, the Buddhists, I mean, c'mon, forgiveness as a way of bestowing grace on oneself is an important load-bearing cornerstones of every spiritual practice that I know of.