Why Would I Need Forgiveness If I Do Not Hold Grudges?
A few days ago, while wandering through the internet the way people wander through supermarkets when they only need bread but somehow end up examining electric drills and exotic sauces, I stumbled across another discussion about forgiveness.
"You must forgive. Forgiveness sets you free. Holding grudges only poisons yourself. Release the past." And so on.
The strange thing was that while reading all this wisdom, I suddenly realized something uncomfortable.
I could not think of a single person I needed to forgive.
At first that sounded almost noble. Mature, even. Then I became suspicious of myself. Surely there must be somebody.
Over the years I have met enough difficult people to fill a medium-sized psychiatric waiting room. Some insulted me. Some treated me unfairly. Some disappointed me badly. A few tried quite enthusiastically to make my life miserable for periods of time.
And yet, when I started mentally searching through old memories, I noticed something odd. The events were still there. The emotions were not.
I remembered what happened perfectly well. I remembered arguments, humiliations, unfair situations, stupid behavior, and people saying things that would probably sound dramatic in a film script. But the anger itself had somehow evaporated years ago.
The memory remained. The emotional charge disappeared.
And sitting there staring at another internet sermon about forgiveness, I found myself wondering: What exactly am I supposed to forgive?
The People Who Stay Angry
This became even stranger when I compared myself to other people.
Every now and then somebody tells me about an old betrayal, a divorce, a family conflict, or some humiliating event from twenty years ago, and I can still hear the anger moving beneath the words like an old engine refusing to stop.
Some people carry resentment for decades. They replay conversations. They remember exact sentences. Sometimes they even rehearse imaginary arguments long after the real people involved have probably forgotten the entire situation.
Occasionally I listen to these stories and quietly think: "Perhaps forgiveness really would help this person."
But then another thought appears almost immediately afterward. "That is not my business." Why would I try to convince somebody else how they should feel about their own pain?
People become strangely ambitious about other people's emotions. Especially online. Everyone wants to teach everyone else how to heal properly. "Forgive. Move on. Let go. Become stronger. Find peace."
The internet is full of emotional fitness instructors. Meanwhile human beings continue being complicated.
Somewhere Along the Way
The more I thought about it, the more I realized that something changed in me a very long time ago. Probably three decades ago, if I am honest.
At some point I simply accepted that the world functions the way it functions and that people behave according to their own fears, limitations, ambitions, weaknesses, and abilities.
Sometimes they hurt others because they are selfish. Sometimes because they are frightened. Sometimes because they are trying to protect themselves. Sometimes simply because they are confused and do not know any better.
Most people are not villains from films. Real life is usually less dramatic and far more chaotic.
A person pushes, lies, manipulates, attacks, humiliates, or disappoints you, and later you realize they were mostly wrestling with themselves the entire time.
That realization does not magically transform bad behavior into good behavior. But it does make hatred feel strangely unnecessary.
The Washing Machine Problem
This does not mean I never become angry. I do. Usually at completely ridiculous things. A screw refuses to fit where it should. A program crashes. The internet stops working exactly when I need it most.
Something mechanical refuses to cooperate despite the fact that I have already spent twenty minutes explaining to it, quite reasonably in my opinion, what it is supposed to do.
At moments like that I can become surprisingly irritated. Then, usually a few minutes later, I suddenly realize how absurd the whole thing is. Becoming angry at a washing machine for using too much detergent makes roughly the same amount of sense as hating rain for being wet.
Reality rarely reorganizes itself according to my preferences. And perhaps people belong in the same category.
Human beings are not vending machines programmed to behave according to our expectations. They disappoint us because they are human. Often inconsistent, emotional, frightened, selfish, insecure, confused human beings.
Including ourselves. Especially ourselves.
The Strange Comfort of Reality
Once I started seeing people this way, resentment gradually became difficult to maintain.
How long can you remain furious at reality for behaving like reality?
Suppose a bureaucrat rejects your application because of some ridiculous regulation. You can spend weeks hating the clerk behind the desk. Meanwhile the clerk is probably just following rules written by politicians you may have voted for yourself.
Or somebody disappoints you because they lacked courage, honesty, maturity, or empathy. It hurts, certainly. But eventually you realize they simply acted according to the limits of their own character.
You expected one thing. Reality delivered another. Pain often appears precisely inside that gap.
The Problem With Expectations
If I am completely honest, most of my strongest frustrations no longer come from other people. They come from myself. Mostly from the moment when reality refuses to cooperate with the version of life I constructed inside my head beforehand.
I expect things to fit together neatly. I expect plans to work. I expect people to understand something that was obvious to me. I expect progress.
Then the screw does not fit the hole because I chose the wrong screw. The situation falls apart. The conversation goes badly. The project fails. And suddenly I feel irritated at the world itself for not following my internal script.
The older I get, the more I suspect this is less a moral problem and more a mechanical one.
Human beings constantly collide with reality and then become offended that reality remained solid.
So What Exactly Is Forgiveness?
This eventually brought me back to the original question. Why would I need forgiveness if resentment never fully settles inside me in the first place?
Perhaps forgiveness is necessary only when anger continues living long after the event itself has ended. Perhaps some people genuinely need to forgive because otherwise resentment slowly poisons everything around it.
That seems real enough. But in my own case, something else happened years ago. I stopped expecting the world to behave fairly all the time. Not in a bitter way. Not cynically. Simply realistically.
People disappoint each other. Governments create stupid rules. Relationships fail. Some individuals behave selfishly. Others behave heroically. Most alternate between both depending on the day and the amount of sleep they had the night before.
Once you accept this, hatred begins to feel exhausting. And oddly unnecessary.
Leaving Things Where They Happened
The memories remain, of course.
I still remember unpleasant people and unpleasant situations. Some memories still make me shake my head and think: "What an idiot."
Occasionally the idiot was me.
But the emotional storm itself no longer follows the memory around. The event stays in the past where it happened. And perhaps that is the closest thing to forgiveness I understand. Not some grand spiritual ceremony. Not dramatic emotional liberation.
Simply allowing things to stop living rent-free inside your nervous system for the next thirty years.
Life already produces enough fresh problems without carefully preserving all the old ones as well.
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