Forgive and forget simultaneously

“True forgiveness is when you can say, " Thank you for that experience. ” These liberating words of Oprah Winfrey have always moved me no end. Forgiveness is not just a mere or isolated act in one's life. It should be a lifetime noble spirit. Perhaps the most difficult thing for all humans is forgiving. It's aptly said that loving is quite easy but forgiving is correspondingly difficult. Unless one's the Buddha, Nelson Mandela or an indifferent Zen master, forgiving is something that eludes most of us. We may forgive a person, but we don't easily forget his/her betrayal. In fact, if you say that you've forgiven someone but haven't forgotten, your forgiveness is not complete. To forgive a person completely, you must forget as well. Otherwise, it'll continue to rankle. Forgiving sans forgetting is rancour and rancour always rankles. Forgiveness is a holistic process. It's comprehensive. The biographer of Nelson Mandela narrated a true instance from the exalted life of the great African leader. After becoming the President of South Africa, one day, a white man came to meet Mandela and said, ' I'm sorry. I hurt you badly when you were imprisoned.' Mandela smiled and asked him, " Sorry, I don't remember. Did you really hurt me?" We choose a particular day like Kshamapana Divas in Jainism when we symbolically forgive all. While it's good, the point remains, why should we restrict the most sublime human attribute to a specific day? Let forgiveness subsume and suffuse our whole being to become a part of our collective consciousness . One really feels lighter than a feather when one truly forgives someone from the recesses of the heart. Don't let anger and resentment keep gnawing at you. Forgive and forget at the same time and in a single breath.

Authored by: Sumit Paul