An elderly relation, otherwise a gem, has just one fault. She cannot forgive those who have hurt her. I have known her to dredge over their sins time immemorial and over the years; this wonderful lady has become ridden with anger.

I have a friend, whose parents were divorced when they were tiny children about 45 years back. This was a time when divorces were unheard of and my friend had to suffer virtual ostracism from her relatives. She recalls being given broken biscuits when she went to visit one of them, but what was remarkable was her attitude. “I used to take one so as to not offend them, but after that I would not take any more,” she told me. What a delicate balance she struck between politeness and self-respect. She grew up with almost no trace of bitterness and is today one of the finest persons I know with a vast reservoir of love and compassion for the world.

It’s really no wonder that the saying goes, ‘To err is human, to forgive divine.’ It’s not easy to forgive. Sometimes, the hurts we are dealt with seem unforgivable, grievous transgressions against our humanity and dignity. Betrayals…slights…insults…humiliations…and worse. We cannot imagine being okay with such behaviour.

Sometimes, it’s a question of our sense of self. We wish to convey the fact that we have been injured. We want to make sure that the said person will never again hurt us in this manner. The darker side of us also wants to hurt them as they have wounded us; it wants them to suffer and writhe in pain. Not being able to forgive our transgressors is therefore very understandable, very human, so forgiveness is not a question of morality.

A Question of Pragmatism
What is it then? It is a question of pragmatism. Forgiveness hurts us much less than it hurts the other. Not forgiving someone means that we carry the baggage of the hurt memory wherever we go. The more we feed it with our recollection and powerful feelings, the heavier it gets and the more space it takes inside us. Sometimes we become obsessed with the person and the injury. I presume that is what happens to those who stab or throw acid on former lovers. The sense of injury wells inside until it drowns out all perspective and better feelings.

Most of us have accounts to settle – the nursery teacher who called you greedy in front of the whole class, the sister who threw a tantrum until your parents gave her the bicycle bought for you, the colleague who badmouthed you to your boss and lost you his good opinion. Most of the time these are minor and only cause an occasional twinge, but if you truly want peace and happiness, you will have to expunge even these injuries from your consciousness. You will need to forgive if you want to free yourself.

Epitomes of Evil
This, for me, is the most unacceptable consequence of not forgiving. We are at the mercy of those we cannot forgive. It is not the reverse. They take up our mind space. People we would not ordinarily have thought about twice, now loom before us on our mind screen. Their crimes become humungous, Hitlerian in their intensity and they themselves become the epitome of all evil, while we become those tiny creatures staring up at them, pitiable and helpless victims within our mind screen, completely unable to put them in their places. Eventually we do something we should not have done and even that we place at their doors: They are our downfall, we shriek. Why did we ever meet them? They become the most important people in our lives, more so than the ones we love the most in the world.

So forgive. Holding on to grudges is not worth it. They stop us from living, from growing, from moving on – we become stagnant and stagnancy is death.