"My personal revenge will be this song bursting for you with no more fears." -- Tomás Borge
THAT is a direct quote from a protest poem. He was a Sandinista freedom fighter. Those words echo of defiance and protest but also of hope and freedom. It can also be for forgiveness.
It is not easy to forgive perhaps because the people who are capable of hurting or betraying us are not strangers. In fact the people who can hurt us the most are the ones closest to us. The closer, the more pain. Friends and family. Perhaps the pain is worse because of disbelief and even amazement at the audacity of the act. No it is not easy to forgive. But if we have to go on with our lives we need and not must do it. Forced forgiveness is not forgiveness at all. No such thing as forced forgiveness. We forgive because we want to, because it is our choice. And that is the essence of it. It is never about the other person.
Oftentimes we hear, "How can I forgive when he or she did not say sorry?" Forgiveness is not about the other person, it is all about your choice. You choose to forgive. It is that simple. If you are not ready to forgive, then do not. We are just hypocrites if we say we forgive when in fact we are simmering underneath. We are merely fooling ourselves. The thing is we choose to forgive. And the persons need not be even present. We just forgive and say we will go on. Ah but the gap between the pain and release is quite wide. Some people spend their lives unwilling to forgive. Others are just too weak to let go. And if that goes on, something happens to us. We become jaded, cynical, bitter and spent. We become weary of the pain. And we live with it day by day, each moment we choose to relieve the pain and replay the hurt. And we seethe inward. Or we can forgive. How? Well too long to write here. But the first step is to choose to do so. And that is a big first step.
The poem ends with these beautiful and powerful lines. "My personal revenge will be to give you these hands you once ill-treated with all their tenderness intact."
He is saying, your cruelty did not affect me, your evil did not stain me, your hatred did not touch me. But we say, of course it did and yes it did. You would not be human if it did not affect, stain or touch me. It did but I made a choice not to be what you wanted me to be. Or expected. I rose to the point of detachment because what I saw in you no longer affects me.
Our best revenge to cruelty is kindness. Hatred to love. Bestiality to divinity.