Making mistakes, having poor judgment, and doing things we know we shouldn’t in the heat of the moment are a natural part of the human condition. Why then are we so hard on ourselves?
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Turning toward our mistakes with forgiveness rather than judgment or blame contributes significantly toward feeling peace in our heart. It is like bringing a soothing balm to painful parts of ourselves that we have long rejected.
—Mark Coleman
Last night I dreamt I was trying to apologize to someone I had harmed long ago. My dream mea culpa was to a person I injured in real life and was sincere. My offering of contrite redress did not go well. Each action I took trying to repair the long-ago injury only made matters worse. We did not bridge the chasm between us. Instead of soothing one person’s injury, I ended up hurting two additional people. As I woke, I felt disquieted and dispirited.
For a short time, I remain 66 years old. In my slightly more than six and a half decades on this orb I have caused many harms. Some of the harms I think were quite grievous. Most of my wrongs I inflicted were from negligence, immaturity and/or ignorance. Still, some of the maltreatment others received at my hands was intentional, usually because I thought I was justifiably avenging a wrong I had suffered. Of course, there were some injuries I instigated because I am human and hard baked into my DNA is the capacity for unwarranted cruelty.
Thinking back on these wrongs, my stomach churns a little. Usually, I shudder and shake it off. More likely than not it is some odd bit of stimuli, say like when a hit song from 1976 plays on my speakers that gives rise to the angsty moment. I hear an old Al Stewart tune and up from the floorboards seeps a caustic and crushing comment I made in a bar 40 years ago. When the words replay in my head, I feel dirty.
Normally I can put the memory into a mental box and once there let it fade again because I know time is a river that moves in only one direction and that direction is away from the event. Aware of this, I can accept there is no way I can return to that moment and assuage the wound I caused. If that ploy doesn’t work to bury the guilt my mind also drags up the rationalization of the injured having probably have moved and not even remembering the event. The last fallback to drive the disquiet away is thinking the injured person probably dished out there a fair share of pain to others over the years and on balance it doesn’t matter because morally we are even.
But there are a couple of people that when they cross my mind the rationalizations don’t work. I know in my heart of hearts I hurt them so very badly. Mere words and the passage of time will never make what I did or what I said better. The ugly splotch on life’s living room wall can never really be papered over.
The anguish I feel about these actions is one of the big two things that should they cross my mind when I am in bed waiting for sleep will keep me up for hours. Of course, the other main sleep disrupter is when I start thinking about what comes after we open the dark door. Is it nothing? Is it reward or punishment? Is it a movement up or down the scale of being on the road to enlightenment.
These folks the ones I hurt but can’t shake are not people I have current connections with. I don’t even know where they are or if they still “are”. People are starting to leave this life at a regular clip now and the chances to offer amends if it were right to do so are fading fast. A.A. says that one should make, “a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.” The next step says we should make direct amends where is it possible to do so when making the amends won’t hurt the already injured person or injure others. The moral evaluation of who we have harmed and would they, or others, be hurt by an attempted amends can be very, very tricky.
And what do you do when you know not where, or if, a person you injured is? I went to a Buddhist celebration of life once. We all wrote down a positive message to the deceased and I believe at the end of the day this bits of writing were gathered together and burned. Maybe I should write the wrong down on small sheet of paper. Below it I should write out the sincerest words of apology and regret. When I am done, I should ultimately crumple it up, set the paper on fire and let both the wrong and the words of amends to pass from this world.
Maybe I am just more angsty that most people. Or maybe I have been more of a bastard in this life that most people. (I do note I was a lawyer and I know the scale of bastardly-ness has an extreme far end.) Or maybe it was my Baptist upbringing with its emphasis on sin and forgiveness that wired my brain to go back again and again to both real and perceived wrongs I wrought. Whatever the source of my internal disquiet when I came across the article by Mr. Coleman, I found it refreshing.
If we can understand that not a single person gets through this life without harming another in some way or form, we can stop torturing ourselves and move toward forgiving ourselves. When we do our hearts are free to be open to the moment and we can with acceptance and understanding move toward the next right choice. I doubt I am done with my bad dreams, they seem to be hard wired into me. But I can move forward with love, compassion and acceptance. Maybe I will write those wrongs and amends down and burn them. Maybe that physical act will let my mental shackles drop.
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