last unsteady steps out of stockholm
Wednesday 13 December 2006 | I like a cookie
6. Give up expecting things from other people, or your life, that they do not choose to give you. Recognize the “unenforceable rules” you have for your health or how you or other people must behave. Remind yourself that you can hope for health, love, peace and prosperity and work hard to get them.
7. Put your energy into looking for another way to get your positive goals met than through the experience that has hurt you. Instead of mentally replaying your hurt seek out new ways to get what you want.
8. Instead of focusing on your wounded feelings, and thereby giving the person who caused you pain power over you, learn to look for the love, beauty and kindness around you. Forgiveness is about personal power.
9. Amend your grievance story to remind you of the heroic choice to forgive.
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These final forgiveness steps seem so distant, far too far away to take, the last few at the top of a mighty temple or monument stairway, and you’re struggling at the bottom, antlike, panting.
Then one day you’re taking a nap, sleeping next to the Brujo. You wake up for no reason, and as you’re wondering why you’re awake you hear or feel a tiny but distinct pop, like a small bubble bursting. What was that, you wonder, lying very still. What was that little snapping sound? You spend a few sleepy moments searching around inside your mind for something that used to be always there, something jagged and rough-edged and bulky and immovable and sharp, and then you realize you can’t find it. And then you realize what it is—what it was, what’s now missing.
It’s hatred. You don’t hate him anymore. Just like that. And through no discernable effort on your part—maybe just because enough time has passed, or you’ve been given enough love, or you’ve given yourself enough love, or the hatred faeries got bored and the compassion faeries came back inside all hot and thirsty from playing in the back garden and wanting lemonade. You can explore all you want, you can poke around inside your heart with your consciousness like a tongue seeking a sore tooth—it’s gone. You can’t hate him even if you try. And not because of the many supposedly good reasons (he was too young, he was undermedicated, he was abused as a child, you were primed to be someone’s victim)—nope. Just because. Just: pop. Gone.
Forgiveness, the Sponsor said to me in the kitchen at Pedro’s birthday, as I furiously frosted chocolate a piano-shaped cake, is a word we use when what we really want is for this uncomfortable, unpleasant feeling to be gone. We say, I wish I could forgive him, or Why can’t I forgive her. And we can use it against ourselves: I’m such a bad person, I’m so unforgiving. But what we mean is that we’re stuck. Something seemed to happen once, and it’s over now, but we think it’s still happening. Every time we think about it, it happens again in our minds. And if we could see that it isn’t happening any more, and didn’t really happen anyway, we’d feel the relief we so badly want to feel.
Today, waiting for the Cool Psychiatrist to arrive and dispense meds (she’s my pusher), I involuntarily listened to a pair of deeply crazy clients chatting in the public waiting room. (My thought-judgment: I mean, I’m just as crazy as they are, but at least I don’t inflict it on strangers!) Nonetheless, or therefore, they had a fabulous conversation—or, more accurately, conversations: his (teenaged Hispanic gangsta) about being a heavy metal guitarist, hers (elderly white bag-lady) about her brother, a jazz pianist and historian who recently relocated to teach at the university in Lisbon. She said, addled, groping for words: “I’m not a musician. I’m a geographer, and an oil painter, and a poet. All I know about music is beauty. The beauty of music.”
But there was something about the softness of her voice when she said it.
I don’t understand much of anything. I don’t know the whole story, and I don’t have to know it. I only know that something went pop, the bubble burst and I’m abruptly done being angry and filled with hate—for now, anyway. Go and obsess no more, someone wrote to me. But it’s only Jesus who has the right to be so imperative with us, because at the same time his touch has gently, imperceptably removed the obsession. I can hope for health, love, peace and prosperity. I can hope to forgive. Can hope for forgiveness.
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