“Holding anger is a poison. It eats you from inside. We think that hating is a weapon that attacks the person who harmed us. But hatred is a curved blade. And the harms we do we do to ourselves.” Mitch Albom
“The worst prison would be a closed heart.” Pope John Paul II
Haven’t we all wanted to get revenge at some point in our lives? Many or most of us don’t follow through with it but we fantasize about it maybe even plan it and attempt to pull it off. With time we sort of forget about it but at random times throughout our lives the desire resurfaces.
Our lives are like watching a movie. It takes various twists and turns. As the audience at a movie theater we sit back and think why the character did something. They should have known it wouldn’t work out. We make these assumptions because we are calmly observing the movie and reflecting on what might happen next as the presentation flows along. Sometimes we even have sympathy for the protagonist who suffers tremendously in the end. We wish he or she would have seen things happening sooner and learned the lesson the easy way rather than the hard way.
We can usually figure out what is going to transpire because we recognize the plot and we are manifesting our own version. In reality that is exactly what we need to do in our own lives. Instead we take risks with our bad behavior, poor choices, lapse of thought, and horrible speech and actions emanating from our poorly controlled tempers. It would be helpful if we transferred the learning from the movie to our real life situation.
Retaliation, anger and animosity decay our minds and hearts. We become covered over in rust which doesn’t allow us to see the humanity of another. Life requires thought more than hindsight although hindsight is commendable. Calmly musing on life selections gives more credibility to our picks. Our lives require us to view the whole picture just like in a movie. If we go this way what will the outcome be. If we go down that road will the results be satisfying or destroying.
By ruminating what our needs require against our desires we consider the consequences of our selections. Payback is not an easy thing to accomplish and is less satisfying when we are successful. We become as depraved as the person who erred against us. That is not an example we want to hold up for our kids to emulate.
The strange part of life is that at the end those who hurt us usually are punished in life’s own way. Maybe we don’t get to see it but if we could we would find them wallowing in their own created misery. You see we all must learn the lesson. The lesson bites us when we begin experiencing what we dished out at another person. It is not pleasant when the shoe is on the other foot.
By having forgiveness in your heart, you acquire the lesson. An empty heart fills with wrath, spills out revenge and gets replaced with the rust that must be scraped away with hard lessons. Good or evil lives are full of enough pain and we don’t need to inflict any more. Just knowing it is not so much about hardships as it is about awareness. We tread the same road, face the same obstacles and confront similar disappointments.
Alleviating another’s hurts helps support us in our time of pain. We have the option to learn the easy or hard way but we all participate in the course. We all have our own life show to live. Transfer your knowledge about books and film to understanding that without deliberation decisions are random and detrimental. Reviewing a movie or book is not as important as pondering the real motion picture which is your own life.
“Our civilization lacks humane feeling. We are humans who are insufficiently humane! We must realize that and seek to find a new spirit. We have lost the sight of the ideal because we are solely occupied with thoughts of men instead of remembering the thoughts of the spirit. By having a reverence for life, we enter into a spiritual relation with the world, by practicing reverence for life we become good, deep and alive.” Albert Schweitzer
“Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.” Mark Twain
