Do you ever wonder if forgiving yourself is most of the battle?

In acknowledging the presence of conscience, knowing we would’ve done things differently had we known better, even if we know better now, and having made or being willing to make amends, we can rest easy, forgiven.  Reconciliation within is necessary before we can offer it to others.  But it’s still a struggle, and it can be exhausting — forgiving ourselves.  Because we crave to be at peace, forgiving ourselves is but the first step on our healing journey.

You didn’t know what you were doing.  You do now.  Retrospect can be the cruellest of judge.  You didn’t know what you were accepting was going to lead where it did.  You know now.  You didn’t know what a course of action would inevitably cost you or your loved ones.  You didn’t know.  Should have known?  But how?  And you do know now.  And even in situations where we did plunge into things where angels may have feared to tread, we got to experience some unintended consequences and unanticipated things, and these events have become part of our personal learning journey.

The point is about reconciling these matters, making peace with ourselves.  Regret can rip us apart when we allow retrospect to be a judging voice rather than a kind voice.

Retrospect is a funny thing.  We are so wise through the eyes of retrospect, through the vision of 20/20 hindsight.  Of course, we are!  We see everything as it panned out, all the while forgetting the complicating, confusing and confounding things that compromised us in the first place.

Seeing from retrospect, you see the fullest array of vision, from several angles, even in super slow-mo.  Every angle can be analysed, critiqued, criticised.  Yet, beforehand we had no idea and, how could we? We must forgive ourselves because we need to forgive ourselves, just as much because it would be unfair not to.  Just another application of Jesus saying, “Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they’re doing.”

Why is it that it’s sometimes easier to forgive somebody else, yet we may struggle to forgive ourselves?  Or, perhaps we can see now that we cannot forgive the other person until we can first forgive ourselves?

We go back into our mind’s eye and ask ourselves over and over again why we allowed ourselves to endure what we did, why we stayed, why we listened to certain people, why we let ourselves be pressured, why we didn’t back out earlier.  Yet, we can stop this anytime we want.  Yes, it may return and plague us.  But we have the opportunity to develop a new habit.

If we went right back into that situation all over again, knowing what we only knew back then, given our lack of life experience in that kind of situation, we can understand why we decided to do what we did.

We can go back to that version of ourselves and say, “I know you did your best – and we learned something, didn’t we? – I shouldn’t have judged you – thank you.”

Photo by Micah Tindell on Unsplash