By Kashika Saxena
Have you ever seen children playing? Have you ever noticed how they’re fighting and arguing one second and building sand castles the next? Just how simple will our lives be, if we follow suit. Agreed, kids fight over broken toys and stolen candies and we fight over broken hearts and stolen money, but the end result is the same. Young, nascent humans realize the importance of forgiveness much more than grown-up, supposedly worldly wise humans.
As we grow up, we realize that the world is not as sweet as we are. There are people, who will hurt us, disappoint us, make us mad and want to murder them. The rigmarole of hurting and healing also evolves as we do and harmless fights turn into plotted battles.
But if in the end, someone realizes his folly and seeks forgiveness, it should be granted to him. This is not to say that every sin should be forgotten and every blasphemy forgiven, but after you’ve screamed bloody murder, done everything you can to mend things, tried extremely hard to show the other person, who is the boss, it’s time to let go.
If the offender doesn’t realize his mistake and apologize, then it is absolutely futile to waste any time on someone like that. Ergo, forgive and move on. Trying to survive in this big, bad world is a herculean task in itself, then why are we so keen on adding to our woes, the burden of animosity? We need to understand that forgiveness isn’t a favor to someone else. It’s something that will free us from acerbic memories.
Sometimes it so happens, that people easily (or otherwise) forgive other people, who’ve offended them but it takes them a very long time to forgive themselves for their own mistakes. We become the epitome of forgiveness and tolerance, and one day we realize that we’ve been holding grudges against ourselves all our lives. We committed mistakes, blunders and some sins and received the divine forgiveness, but from others and not ourselves.
It might not be as easy as it sounds, but we’re all worth a million rupees in our own right. And obviously the people who’ve affronted us aren’t worth a penny. Or sometimes, when a dear one hurts us, though much more painful, the event is not worth dwelling on for long, because too much is at stake. In any case, the best thing to do is to forgive and move on.
Forgiving doesn’t make you less of a person or more of a person. It just makes you a person who realizes that life is too precious a thing to be wasted in scheming or plotting or sulking over bygones.
