Help yourself …Make life easy!

Read this on a blog somewhere and cannot help but marvel at the powerful and wonderfully comforting message conveyed by these words.

We spend a lot of our time and effort in building relationships and harbouring expectations and invest equally, if not more, in bearing grudges and the weight of expectations gone wrong. While the former is a source of joy and essence of our existence, the latter sucks the life force out and makes one go through life as if it were a hellhole. However, considering what it takes to build one, it would only be commensurate to say that when a bond of love or friendship goes wrong, one goes through a plethora of emotions ranging from anger to denial to sadness and finally acceptance. And if there is one emotion that stays strongly and firmly put in mind and heart all through these phases, it is the desire to get an apology from the one who seems to have wronged you. An apology which is sincere…an apology which gives one the conviction of being right…an apology which acknowledges the hurt or the wrongdoing..and last but not the least, an apology which creates way for the hearts to be healed and bonds to be restored.

However, isn’t a sincere apology scarcest of the commodities on this earth? Not only does it require one to introspect and acknowledge that they are probably responsible for hurting someone, it also forces one to keep ego and false notions of self aside and humble down to a level where actions and words convey the sense of responsibility and need for forgiveness that one may be feeling,in a language that is understandable by the recipient.

 No wonder then, to apologise is one of the hardest things to do. But if there is anything that comes closer, it’s the ability to forgive and forget. A wronged and bruised soul finds it much easier to nurse the hurt, let it grow, wallow in anger and self pity and let the grudge settle permanently. Many times we lose out on all that someone has to offer us just because we are not able to let go of that one grudge, that one mistake that broke the trust and scathed the heart. The feeling of being wronged or victimized is so overwhelming that it impedes the process of rational thinking , comes in the way of acceptance of a person for what he or she is and not for what we want or expect  and prevents us from moving on and not letting the bad things outweigh the good ones. More often than not, it even leads to more destructive feelings of revenge and retribution as the only ways of nursing the anger and the pain broiling in the aftermath of a bad hand dealt by someone who mattered a lot at one time.

Because we lose so much when we choose to live with our grudges, an ability to forgive and forget is not something that we gift to others. It is, in fact, liberation of our own soul and a way of setting ourselves free from all that prevents us from being at peace. To forgive is always easy if there is an attempt by the perpetrator to assuage the hurt as it acts as a balm on the suffering and helps to boost one’s conviction of being wronged and therefore, deserving of another’s acknowledgement and repentance.Forgetting, however, is an altogether different thing and may or may not come by!

But considering that we stand to gain so much if we just decide to forgive and forget, why do we even need an apology to forgive? Does the fact that someone confess they hurt us really hasten up the process of forgiveness? Isn’t Forgiveness is a choice? A conscious decision..an action of our own will? To save ourselves from the bitterness of anger...to give ourselves the freedom from hurt..to let go and move on…a victory of positive over negative.. to cherish what could be than what prevents it …to create happy and peaceful  human bonds for ourselves …and last but not the least, to choose to live the way we want and not the way situations and other people force us into. This transition from expectations of an apology to a state where it no longer matters and where the heart is able to heal itself ,may not be easy to come by. However, once achieved, does it not seem to be the easiest way to live our lives through the maze of human relations, delicate expectations and myriad complex situations?Why then are we so loathe to take this path? Why there is always a lingering hope that one day someone would acknowledge and come back and tell us how they regret things went wrong?Should we not just learn to rationalise with our own heart and mind and create a wall which lets no one hurt us in a way that we keep looking for a balm?

I don't know how much sense it makes to the world in general but to me,it does feel like one of the best gift we can give to ourselves if we just learn to let go..to rid ourselves of the weight of this big expectation of an apology ...and to accept an apology even when there is none!