Mahatma Gandhi said, "The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is an attribute of the strong."
This has been running in my head for the past few days ever since one of my school friends announced on our group chat on Watsapp that she spent the day with female prisoners and was not sure whether it was worth her time.
Felons deserve no mercy right, it's just rewards. After all they did something that warrants punishment and why should we fret over their plight and waste our sympathy on those who deserve what they get.
When I mull over this, there's a part of me that agrees and there's this other line of thought which prompts me to believe that although they have committed a crime, we do not know the circumstances that pushed them to or how they arrived at that point form where crime seemed the only option. In a certain sense, unless one is a psychopath, crime is something one doesn't meticulously plan in the quiet of the mind. It largely is an action to a reaction or an escape route from suppression.
If we as strangers who are not directly related to the crime can't find it easy to forgive imagine the trauma of the people connected to the victims, the parents, family and friends. And yet, I know of people who reach out and forgive the perpetrator.
Forgiveness isn't something you offer only to a crime, even petty skirmishes need this absolvence. I know a lot of people and I have on occasion said it too, 'I forgive but I never forget'. It's just a line. Believe me, we want to look grand by saying I am the better person and I forgave but when you say the next part of that line you negate the gesture.
Why should we forgive, especially when we have been hurt and been through traumatic times? I think keeping a grudge is like cutting your nose to spite your face. Negative thoughts and feelings weigh us down and drag our emotions to a nadir too. It's a slippery slope, happy thoughts keep us happy and negative thoughts worsen it for us.
To let go of a grudge from deep within one's soul, to look at it with compassion and understanding and decide that it was a moment of weakness which made the person do what they did, when you tell yourself that the other person was a victim of their thinking and while they were silly but did not mean to deliberately hurt you, it's freedom.
The power of forgiveness is in liberation, most of us dont realise it but when you let go, you untie the shackles of negativity that binds you and now you breathe easy, simplify your life and just inhale postivity.
Forgive... not as a chore you are doing for someone let it rather be a gift unto yourself.
This has been running in my head for the past few days ever since one of my school friends announced on our group chat on Watsapp that she spent the day with female prisoners and was not sure whether it was worth her time.
Felons deserve no mercy right, it's just rewards. After all they did something that warrants punishment and why should we fret over their plight and waste our sympathy on those who deserve what they get.
When I mull over this, there's a part of me that agrees and there's this other line of thought which prompts me to believe that although they have committed a crime, we do not know the circumstances that pushed them to or how they arrived at that point form where crime seemed the only option. In a certain sense, unless one is a psychopath, crime is something one doesn't meticulously plan in the quiet of the mind. It largely is an action to a reaction or an escape route from suppression.
If we as strangers who are not directly related to the crime can't find it easy to forgive imagine the trauma of the people connected to the victims, the parents, family and friends. And yet, I know of people who reach out and forgive the perpetrator.
Forgiveness isn't something you offer only to a crime, even petty skirmishes need this absolvence. I know a lot of people and I have on occasion said it too, 'I forgive but I never forget'. It's just a line. Believe me, we want to look grand by saying I am the better person and I forgave but when you say the next part of that line you negate the gesture.
Why should we forgive, especially when we have been hurt and been through traumatic times? I think keeping a grudge is like cutting your nose to spite your face. Negative thoughts and feelings weigh us down and drag our emotions to a nadir too. It's a slippery slope, happy thoughts keep us happy and negative thoughts worsen it for us.
To let go of a grudge from deep within one's soul, to look at it with compassion and understanding and decide that it was a moment of weakness which made the person do what they did, when you tell yourself that the other person was a victim of their thinking and while they were silly but did not mean to deliberately hurt you, it's freedom.
The power of forgiveness is in liberation, most of us dont realise it but when you let go, you untie the shackles of negativity that binds you and now you breathe easy, simplify your life and just inhale postivity.
Forgive... not as a chore you are doing for someone let it rather be a gift unto yourself.
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